Owl Sense Read online

  A century later, taxidermy had a new resurgence with a folk art revival in the late twentieth century. Now it is in fashion again, and few towns are without their resident taxidermist. On some level does it still reinforce notions of human separateness, that we alone can somehow restore life after death? We arrange these animals as still lives, aesthetic close-ups, lifelike creatures placed in supposedly charismatic poses. But a stuffed animal’s conspicuous, dead eyes sparkle with irony. The animal looks less glamorous than mortified. Trapped in our gaze it is held in some kind of freakish netherworld.

  *

  Ali holds the scalpel like a quill pen, as if we are practising calligraphy. The owl looks asleep, eyes shut tight at an angle of 45 degrees, two diagonals aligned with its long bill. The facial disc is crumpled tight into a wince, making a perfectly symmetrical heart shape. Then I think that it’s a frown, a protection of the tender little face, the ruff of the brow dipping defensively between the eyes. It’s somehow soulful, even in death.

  The intimacy of what Ali does takes me by surprise: to part the breast feathers and find a point where we can begin takes ultra-delicate fingertip searching amongst the dense breast feathers. And then she takes the scalpel and strokes the exposed skin with the tip of the blade, making the softest of scratches as the bird’s front opens. There is no blood, only dark muscle. Her skill finds the sternum through the thin skin, and as Ali searches I’m painfully reminded of when I pick up one of my chickens when she is broody and feel at my fingertips the sudden heat emanating from her silky-warm brood patch, the place where she warms new life from her clutch of eggs.

  Taxidermy, Ali says, is making dead things look lifelike. Sometimes the collections in the museum have a label that hurts the heart: a ‘last-known example of …’ and the loneliness of the creature comes to life all over again. In that moment I feel it is not just the animal’s loneliness, but ours, too.

  The sternum becomes visible as Ali makes the cut. The quietest of sounds, like cutting through tissue paper. Hannah gathers pinches of a white powder called borax. I can’t place where I’ve heard of this but it sounds domestic, a chemical product housewives would use during the 1950s? The borax goes into the skin in little sprinkles, to dry out the thin fatty layer underneath. Owls cannot afford to be fat, and here the modest layer of butter yellow is micro-thin. Even this meagre body fat shows that it was well fed; it did not die of starvation at least, as many inexperienced owls do in their first year before they have learned to be good hunters.

  The drumsticks are broken so that they can slide out of the skin – I begin to feel more uncomfortable as this perfect owl is dismembered and effectively turned inside out.

  ‘You’re taking the skin off like a glove,’ Ali says. ‘The whole body will come out in one piece, more or less.’

  We’re avoiding fossicking through entrails as this is not an autopsy, it’s skinning. By not puncturing the chest or abdomen, we are left with what looks like a miniature chicken carcass, but the rich red colour of hung pheasants that I have seen in butchers’ shops. And now we need to hang the bird upside down, to undress it from the tail up over the chest. The face scrunches even tighter as it is pulled like a snug-fitting jumper, and the expression ‘skintight’ will never feel the same to me after this day.

  The scalpel does its work, leading the hand to peel and prise the skin off by increments. Now the breast is exposed, meaty, and muscular for flight. The colour remains imprinted on my retina – indecent, purplish-red, rich as heartwood. The whole length of the neck snakes out from its skin, a rope of braided cartilage, invisible in life – when the owl is sitting, it doesn’t look as though it has any neck at all, but brought out from underneath the feathers, it’s s-shaped, sinuously attached to the skull.

  It’s a challenge to pull the skin over the skull and hoist it off. We look at the skinned cranium, and I notice its shape. Owls owe much of their popularity to their flat, humanoid faces, but without the covering of the feathered facial disc the skull reveals something altogether different. The eyes are angled slightly apart, to give a wide field of view, and the overlap is small, so the owl must bob its head to maximise its binocular vision. The owl’s bill is much longer than at first shows. Usually it is buried within the central ridge of feathers of the facial disc. Now I can see that the long bill allows for a wide gape – just the size to easily swallow down a plump vole and smoothly eject a pellet.

  Owls have such large eye cavities! The empty eye sockets have their strange cartilaginous tubes, totally rigid, the sclerotic rings that are there to keep the huge eyes in but prevent them from moving. Now I can physically see how it cannot turn its eyes, and why having such a long and super-supple neck is paramount. Visibly, the owl has an extra-long neck, and compared to us it has additional cervical vertebrae – we have seven in our neck, the owl has fourteen – and it has recently been discovered that the spaces within each vertebra are enlarged for increased blood flow, which explains why it can turn its face in almost a complete circle without giving itself a fatal embolism.

  With the owl’s body in my hands, I question again what is it that drives us to do these things. Beyond the taxidermy, is it the ardour of science, fetish, or maybe simply the desire to find out something intimate, to tell the animal’s story, and perhaps through that to see a new side of our own? This evening has been a kind of exploration of the owl as an unknown continent, we the explorers, discovering the owl’s geography. I don’t always want to think about the mania humans have for collecting trophies, the creation of artificial theatres of stuffed animals for our curiosity and entertainment, while so many species have been and still are being pushed to the edge. We manage, engineer and mediate our experience of wild nature and in doing so do we diminish our experience of it? The stuffed specimens are at least preserved, the science is logged, and yet our curiosity, our need to know more, still drives us onward. To what? Homo sapiens, the wise human. Sometimes I wonder just how wise. So often the specimens we hold in our hands are all that we have left.

  Athene noctua

  LITTLE OWL

  The owl of Minerva takes flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

  G. W. F. HEGEL, Philosophy of Right, (1820) trans. S. W. Dyde, 1896

  The high moorland was woven with August colour, splashed with purple heather and coconut-scented gorse. Sunshine bounced off white cumulus clouds and warmed the backs of roadside-grazing wild ponies that distracted drivers and caused mini traffic jams. There was a stroking southerly breeze that seemed to whisper through the grasses warning of the end of the summer: ‘There will not be many more days like this. Make the most of it …’ On the slopes and tors the soft air threw light and clarity in every direction and from the top of Sharp tor away from all the people and cars we stood with the breeze in our hair and took in all the contours of the moor. Amongst its carpet of green, mauve and gold we saw meadow pipits and golden plovers, a great spotted woodpecker, wheatears and best of all, the dark crossbow form of a hunting peregrine.

  Wind-thrilled and footsore we finally turned to head home and as we dipped into the farmland on the fringe of the moor I saw it. Something odd that just caught my eye from the car window, tucked in close to a dry-stone wall. A little bump where there should have been no bump, a fence post that was slightly higher than it should have been. The post was topped with a roundness, a smooth shape that morphed into feathers, and two eyes now brightly peeking at us.

  I pulled over and peered through the window. Jenny gasped.

  ‘Mum, Mum, it’s an owl! Oh, my God, it’s a Little Owl, right there!’

  The Little Owl glared with ferocious lemon-yellow eyes. We held our breath, delighted.

  In her poem ‘Little Owl who Lives in the Orchard’, Mary Oliver suggests that the Little Owl’s short beak is as sharp as a bottle opener, and that however beautiful, he always stares belittlingly right through you. This Little Owl bore out the poetry, scrutinising us with intimidating outrage. I am sure that nothing
about us escaped its fierce gaze. It must have taken in the window with two pale, excited faces, the car trespassing on its front lawn. Its old-codger-style eyebrows knitted in vexation, static electricity bristled from its whole, small being. We were transfixed.

  Little Owls, I had read, appear to have something named ‘small-owl syndrome’ and regularly punch above their weight. Even here where they are very rare, this one was trying to singe us with its stare. Not much bigger than a song thrush, they can’t hurt people, but often take on birds that are larger than themselves, and frequently get mobbed because of this aggressive tendency. For this reason, they have an ‘occipital face’, the trace of false eye-markings on the very back of their head. This is an evolutionary adaptation that mimics a ‘hard stare’ to fool the mobsters that they are being watched. Perhaps (and I say perhaps because my owl quest was far from over) the most characterful of all the British owls, this small grey-brown owl with speckled, spotted and streaked camouflage is the size of a scruffy tennis ball but with an endearing pear-shaped silhouette. What it lacks in size it makes up for in ferocity, with its furious glare and exaggerated white brows.

  Then, our hearts leapt again. On the ground at the roots of the hawthorn there was a hissing sound, and some movement. Here was the reason for the compressed rage. Distinctive ‘shreee shreee’ begging calls were emitting from the ground, and the adult Little Owl flitted about anxiously trying to distract us. But we stayed quietly put. My binoculars homed on a dark hollow – and a delight hidden between the roots – a downy cache: two, no, three tiny grey owlish faces. A Little Owl nest, on the ground! We stifled our squeals, bundling them in our throats.

  The gnarly bark had been disguising their hiding place but now we could clearly see three faces: three Little Owlets, still softly plumped out in their juvenile plumage, flecked with white, haloed with soft ash-grey around the edges. There was something charming about the defiance of the adult as it stretched up tall on its long legs, all outrage and threat.

  Goblin-like, every Little Owl has its very own individual facial pattern, and we could see it now, particularly around the eyebrows. I’d read about it in my Little Owl book by Andy Rouse, in which he notes that the quirky features give the whole species an especially human quality. The barometer of expressions can vary from surprise through intense concentration to menace, and like most owls, they never look pleased to see a human. My friend Paul Riddle, who has been monitoring the Little Owls in his area of Leicestershire where it seems there is a concentration of them, has a stunning array of owl photographs on his blog ‘Owls about that then’. Paul claims they are by far the best owls because of their wide range of eyebrow styles. There doesn’t seem to be any evolutionary reason for this variety but it does make them seem as individual as people. I hadn’t considered before that any of the owl species might be the best, or even become my favourite, but these Little Owls were suddenly strong contenders. I don’t like the ‘cute’ word, but this owl was undeniably characterful.

  ‘They’re a lot easier to see than you’d think,’ Paul had told me modestly. ‘It’s just a matter of knowing where to look, and being patient. Sometimes you can just do the “kissing” call, the kind you’d do to attract a cat, and they come to you to check you out. Then you can just snap them.’

  Although he made it sound easy, Paul had put in hours of tracking of these birds and had learned that the ‘kissing’ call mimics a rodent in distress. Any predator might react and come along to see if there was an easy kill. You can do it to attract stoats, too. So that day I decided to try my first Little Owl kissing call. But the owls had got the measure of us, and the sentinel parent soon lost interest. Peering through the windscreen we could see it fluff out in a relaxed manner and begin to preen its primary feathers and breast. Shortly afterwards it gave a sharp call, then another, and the three young, visible only by their wispy little heads, tottered further out of their nest hole. Another adult flew in, slightly smaller than the first so possibly the male although it is very hard to tell – unlike other owl species there is limited sexual dimorphism in Little Owls – and presented them with a worm. At this point they suddenly grew tall and scuttled to pick it from his bill. One of the charms of Little Owls is how athletic they are when they run about. Now there were five owls in front of us, all within a few yards of the car window. Two siblings battled over the poor invertebrate in a tug of war until it was stretched like pink elastic. We watched aghast until finally one of them conceded and the winner swallowed the victim whole.

  We left them to it, and drove home on the wings of Athene noctua, the ruffian with downy legs and sulphurous stare imprinted at the back of our eyes. I had been so enamoured of the ghostly glamour of the Barn Owl, and the unholy softness of the Tawny, that I truly hadn’t thought anything could top them. This new owl affected me differently. It had sat in broad daylight and stared spikily back at us, person-like, challenging.

  At home that evening I looked up Little Owls. This was Athene’s owl, the emblem of an ancient Greek goddess revered enough for her image to have been printed as an owl on Athenian coins – proud and distinctive, and recognisably the Little Owl. But why was Athene associated with a Little Owl? John Lydus, a sixth-century scholar, claims it was because ‘she shared the nature of fire; and the owl, her sacred bird, stays awake all night to signify the human soul which is never lazy, always in movement by its very nature, which is immortal.’ This bird, it was believed, could see in the dark when others were blind and had the wisdom to remain hidden all day when it was persecuted. The Greeks saw wisdom, knowledge and prudence in its behaviour and so connected it with Athene, the chaste goddess of wisdom.

  This ancient Greek description of its character seemed to fit with what I had seen, both in my Little Owl encounter in the wild, and in captivity. Flitwick, the perky Little Owl in my local owl sanctuary, instinctively remains hidden for most of the time, although she has the space to fly free. But she is also feisty – she will perch contentedly on an index finger and wait with the utmost confidence to be fed. If you try to stroke her with the back of a finger, she pecks fiercely: this is not a creature to be petted – and stroking can remove valuable oils from the owl’s plumage. She is to be respected, in spite of her small stature. In the wild, Little Owls understand the need for discretion but they will fight off predators such as buzzards and Barn Owls, giants in comparison. With these they will ferociously defend their young, battling to the death if need be. Sadly, they are often beaten and are frequently predated by these larger raptors.

  Through my reading I discovered that the squat, cross-looking, flat-headed fellows that I had seen were not a native British species. Even though born here, and this owl-with-attitude has been present here for generations, it is still considered to be an import. Native to continental Europe, Athene noctua is the most regularly seen owl in southern and eastern European countries, perhaps due to their diurnal and crepuscular activity patterns, but they are now a Species of European Conservation Concern. In Poland, for example, numbers have rapidly declined, possibly due to changing agricultural practices, and much research and conservation effort has been put into nest-box schemes to aid their preservation: in some Polish towns, nest boxes have significantly contributed to the Little Owl’s breeding success.

  The Little Owl thrives in warm, dry countries like Greece, and as it particularly likes to look out from tall vantage points (such as roofs, posts and walls) the richly colonnaded Parthenon, the temple dedicated to Athene, with its tree-like columns, ledges and many shady cavities, must have made a particularly attractive perch and drawn the owls in. Is this another cause of how Athene came to be associated with the Little Owl? The bottom of the truth is probably lost in time. Some mythographers believe that the owl-goddess association might come from even older origins than the Athenian story, from a Minoan palace goddess associated with birds, or even an old European bird-snake goddess.

  Long after the ancient Greeks had faded from the scene, Little Owls continu
ed to be attracted to the ruins of the Parthenon, and so it was that the Little Owl found itself linked with a more recent iconic historical character. In 1850 a young woman was visiting the Parthenon. A small flurry caught her attention, and when she turned, she saw an owlet falling from its nest amongst the rubble. It was too small to fly, and was immediately set upon by a band of merciless children who began persecuting it for fun. The young lady was outraged and chased away the youngsters. Battered and in shock, the dishevelled victim sat at her feet. She scooped it up in her hands and popped it protectively in her pocket. The Little Owl, unaware of its good luck, had been rescued by Miss Florence Nightingale.

  Florence took the owlet home with her, cared for it until it recovered and brought it up. The pair became so attached to one another that they went everywhere together, and ‘Owlet Athena’ travelled around contentedly as a captive owl, although her sharp beak was deployed to peck anyone who attempted to pet her. For five happy years Owlet Athena and Florence kept their companionship. Florence believed a pet could help people in their recovery, and Athena joined her mistress on house calls, often helping patients to forget their pain with her endearing antics. At home she perched on the mantelpiece between statuettes of Theseus and Mercury, and would fly to a plate of food to see what she could devour. On one occasion when Florence’s sister entered the room wearing an unfamiliar cotton bonnet she flew at it, ripped it off and attempted to shred it. The unfortunate headwear was never worn again. She entertained everyone by pouncing on flies and running around the room chasing imaginary mice, but the joy was not to last.