Owl Sense Read online

  As is often the case with wild pets, Owlet Athena had a bad end. When war broke out in the Crimea Florence was called upon to take her nursing skills abroad. Athena could not accompany her into a war zone, and she was left behind in Florence’s attic, where Nightingale believed the owl would be cared for by visits from her family. It was hoped she would be able to feed herself on the large population of mice that lived in the eaves of the house. But Athena was too domesticated to hunt for herself and couldn’t live merely on the insects in the room. Missing her companion and devastated by loneliness, she starved and died. Florence was heartbroken, and arranged for a taxidermist to embalm Athena for posterity. ‘Poor little beastie,’ Florence mourned, ‘it was odd how much I loved you.’

  A little book was written as a memorial about Athena by Florence’s sister: Florence Nightingale’s Pet Owl Athena, A Sentimental History, by Parthenope, Lady Verney. Nursing in the Crimea, Florence confessed to missing her pet and one evening she wrote home: ‘Athena came along the cliff quite to my feet, rose up on her tiptoes, bowed several times, made her long melancholy cry and fled away – like the shade of Ajax – I assure you my tears followed her.’

  Athena’s body was preserved in a characteristic pose inside a glass case in the family home for many years until she was acquired by the Florence Nightingale Museum in London. Amongst the Nightingale collection, perched on her branch, the lifelike Little Athena’s eyes still burn through the glass.

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  Described as ‘naturalised but not native’, this owl is our smallest in Britain – it is only just over half the size of the others, at 23 to 25 centimetres long, and weighing as little as 150 to 170 grams on average – but it has a big story behind its arrival here. The Little Owl was introduced to Britain during the 1880s by bird collector and 4th Baron of Lilford, Thomas Powys. He brought the first pair of birds over from Holland himself, with the aim of adding some more variety to our avifauna. At that time, Britain was home only to Barn Owls, Tawnies and Long- and Short-eared Owls, with an occasional blow-in to the highlands of Scotland of a Snowy Owl. The Little Owl was welcomed at first and employed as a form of pest control, feeding as it does mainly on cockchafers and other beetles and small rodents. The first breeding pair were recorded in Rutland in 1891 and within fifty years the new species had spread far across mainland Britain, although it is a lowland species and even now it does not look as though there are any beyond the borders in Scotland, perhaps because of rough or wet weather which is always a threat to the owl.

  The arrival of a non-native species was for a time considered to be a harmless aesthetic ‘enhancement’ of the environment, an interesting addition to our comparably dull range of owl species, but random introductions of this sort can be disastrous for native wildlife. North American mink have nearly wiped out the British water vole population; Japanese knotweed is busily overwhelming native riverside vegetation, and grey squirrels imported from America have brought with them a pox that has threatened the survival of our defenceless red squirrel. How would the Little Owl’s presence affect our own precious species?

  It turned out that the Little Owl was able to fit in well. It did not compete with other birds of prey, feeding mostly on invertebrates, of which there were plenty to go around, and so it slotted into the ecosystem without any discernible impact. Occasionally it fed on the same prey as Barn Owls and buzzards, but they in turn could predate it, if it got too big for its boots. However, at first gamekeepers, always on the alert for predators, were highly suspicious of its effect on game, and it was persecuted during the first part of the last century on estates where it was believed that it would damage valuable pheasants. In the 1930s the British Trust for Ornithology commissioned Alice Hibbert-Ware to carry out a Little Owl Food Inquiry and thoroughly examine Little Owl prey species. The persecution abated when in 1938 the findings were published and the Little Owl exonerated.

  While it might have taken the Little Owls some time to settle down in England, they are natives on the Continent. And when I found myself holidaying to France that summer, they were there waiting for me. We were going to a village just outside Paris, attending Christine and Marianne’s civil ceremony. Jenny was pleased with the knowledge that this was one up from joining the local Pride march and we formed a trium-feminate of three generations: grandmother, mother and daughter. We packed our bags according to what we each thought would suit a French gay wedding. It was all very exciting, but apart from the regimented Paris parks and gardens, we’d be far away from the wild. I fretted that there would be no owls at all.

  I shouldn’t have worried. As we exited customs and found our way to the train into the city a giant pair of eyes smacked into mine: a 3-metre-tall poster presented the face of an owl in vivid shades of blue and violet, its fierce eyes gazing out over us all. This owl was advertising insurance to the passing commuters, homeless, travellers and tourists – just as we entered the escalators to descend into the underworld of the Métro.

  Resurfacing into the Paris streets we left the guardianship of the violet owl behind and flowed into a cacophony of taxis, buses and motorbikes. The late-summer sunshine bounced off lines of neatly coppiced city trees and beamed into our eyes. Scents of street food, crêpes, chips and waffles hit our noses. Over the cathedral of Notre-Dame flocks of pigeons and jackdaws fluttered and bickered. Along the high walls of the mud-brown river Seine’s carefully engineered banks, amongst the plane trees and trinket sellers, collections of art prints lined the pavements. My eyes lit on a magnificent nineteenth-century portrait of a pair of Tawny Owls. I paused to look. The natural mottling of the plumage, the greens and browns of the whole painting, made a harmonious picture, situated as it was amongst the fallen leaves, dusty greys and shadows of the city’s walkways. Captured in their natural habitat of a rough, knotted oak, beneath the owls, crouched in their nest were three young, peering beadily out of their crook amongst the branches.

  Perhaps it was that my peripheral vision was on the alert, or I’d been thoroughly sensitised to this creature, but I began to feel haunted. The owls wouldn’t leave me alone. After the painting, my eye was drawn to the window display of a bookshop three doors up from our hotel: one side was entirely decorated with a collection of owl books for children: I nipped in and lovingly chose a colourful hardback, Le Bonheur des Chouettes (The Happiness of Owls), but left Hibou (Owl) and Bébés Chouettes (Owl babies) for another time. The pleasant feathered faces of the owls stared out of their book covers, humanlike, watching over the street and attracting customers. On the waxy cover of Le Bonheur des Chouettes two rotund owls nestled close to one another. Once we had checked in to our hotel room, I needed to find out more about the owls’ secret to happiness and devoured the story. According to the charming tale, all the other birds wonder the same thing: what can it be that prevents the happy owl couple from bickering, as all the other animal couples do, after many years of marriage? The two owl lovers wisely explain. ‘We love to watch the turning seasons of nature: the gentle arrival of spring, the leafy summer, the autumn rich in colours, and then the blanket of snow in winter when we can snuggle up together and keep each other warm.’ The other animals can’t believe it, and return to their bickering.

  What is it about owl stories? Perhaps due to the round, motherly shape, the appealing, large eyes and engaging faces that owls have, they have been used to reassure children and to teach them with heartful and cheering storylines: ‘Ewayea! my Little Owlet! Who is this that lights the wigwam? With his great eyes lights the wigwam? Ewa-yea my Little Owlet!’ the wrinkled old Nokomis warmly sings, cradling the infant orphan Hiawatha in Longfellow’s poem. Just when we are at our most tender and learning to be properly human, the creaturely kinship we have with owls becomes a kind of comforter and guide. I had many of these stories read to me as a child and got them all out of the loft to read to my own children when they were old enough. They loved them. A favourite for all of us was The Owl Who was Afraid of the Dark about a baby Barn Owl named Plop
. This one, by the children’s author Jill Tomlinson, was part of a series that encouraged children to get over fears and challenges: Plop is a fluffy little Barn Owl who is quite new to flying and has a fear of the dark. ‘I want to be a day bird,’ Plop declares, but his mother explains that he needs to go and find out about the dark in order to understand it and learn to be less afraid. ‘You are what you are,’ the mother Barn Owl explains. ‘And what I are is afraid of the dark,’ Plop argues. But of course, along with Plop we slowly learn about stepping through fear of the unknown and into possibility: and how exciting, necessary, wonderful and beautiful the dark can be. This one was one of Benji’s favourites. He listened to a cassette recording of it at bedtime repeatedly for months.

  Why was the owl the best kind of animal character to help out? In The Owl Who was Afraid of the Dark, apart from being nocturnal Plop is the best possible guide and companion: he looks and feels like an authentic person. He has two legs like us, and most of all, a flat, human-ish face. Owls’ faces more than any other birds’ resemble ours. It is the flatness that makes them so familiar, and their especially large, round eyes that create attraction by their babyish, helpless beauty. They draw empathy from deep within our cerebral cortex, provoking our suggestible human emotions.

  Then there is their gaze. Because an owl cannot move its eyes, it must turn its head to look directly at the object of its attention so it appears to be deliberately meeting our gaze, and its look feels laden with importance. Above all, the owl’s upright stance and its confident, superior poise appears human. It is like us, yet seems to be party to some secret intelligence. The apparently magical ability to see in the dark and to fly unafraid through the night, as well as its prodigious hunting skills, must have accumulated to make it seem magical, and eventually useful as a symbol of wisdom, and a wise teacher for our children’s stories.

  Animals have always been used to educate, from cave paintings to Aesop and La Fontaine: they have always been sequestered for storytelling and metaphor, perhaps precisely because they can’t talk back. So we imaginatively put words in their beaks, snouts and jaws, and have them explain the world to our smallest ones in a (mostly) unthreatening way. But isn’t it strange that such an emblem of wildness as the untameable owl can have come to seem so domesticated?

  As well as our urge to follow, learn from, explain and tame wild things, we have also attempted to tame our children with these stories. In Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, the eponymous hero and his brother Twinkleberry sail on little rafts that they have constructed from twigs to Owl Island to gather nuts. Each day they respectfully ask permission from the resident owl, Old Brown, but the impertinent Squirrel Nutkin taunts him with teasing riddles. The owl eventually loses his temper and nearly skins the squirrel alive. Nutkin escapes, but loses his tail to the vicious Old Brown. The story warns what can happen if we break the rules and disrespect authority. At the same time, it is also an accurate natural history story with sensitively observed depictions of wild creatures and their characters – not once does it tiptoe around the violence and power of the owl.

  It is a very different portrayal from the heart-warming illustrations of the owl couple in my newly bought children’s book. Back at the hotel that evening I open Le Bonheur des Chouettes again and savour the last page where the owls ‘se blottirent l’une contre l’autre, clignerent de leurs gros yeux ronds, en s’envolant dans leurs pensees empreintes de sagesse.’ ‘The owls blotted [pressed] themselves together, blinked their big round eyes, and drifted off to sleep with thoughts imbued with wisdom.’ The patience and devotion that the two owls display, their acceptance of the seasons, their tender nurturing of their young, and their capacity for gentleness, teach about the simple joys of family life. Both stories contend with a creature that in many ways is like us, but while one focuses on the need for love, the other focuses on the need for respect. Arguably, love cannot exist without admiration and respect, and I think on some level, for all our human stupidities, we truly admire and respect the owl. All through time, perhaps this is why owls have been employed to attract and educate human youngsters.

  Waking the next morning I lie in my hotel bed rolling an owl dream around my head. A Little Owl had been sitting beside me, on the bedstead, clicking its beak and showing me its young, all three lined up beside it, fluffing out their feathers and chattering, as if trying to say something that I could not quite grasp. Perhaps I was beginning to feel a little paranoid, or perhaps something else was coming into focus: if humans and animals were once much more closely allied than we like to think about in our busy, technology-driven lives, perhaps the owls and I were simply re-establishing a better relationship. By paying attention to them properly, I was seeing their personality and resonance more clearly. That was why they were getting into my dreams. I was recognising that they had something to say. After all, unlike us they live in instinctive harmony with the planet – might we not have something to learn from them?

  In his essay ‘The Ecology of Magic’, American philosopher David Abram suggests that to ancestral humankind, wild creatures were purveyors of secrets, carriers of intelligence that we often needed: ‘It is these Others who can inform us of unseasonable changes in the weather, or warn us of imminent eruptions and earthquakes; who show us, when foraging, where we may find the ripest berries or the best route to follow back home.’ Perhaps paying close attention to them could bring us to tune into a different way of seeing our own world; what Abram describes as the ‘ability that an alien form of sentience has to echo one’s own, to instill a reverberation in oneself that temporarily shatters habitual ways of seeing and feeling, and leaves one open to a world all alive, awake and aware’.

  I got up to a tummy-settling breakfast of fresh croissants. We had planned a day of sightseeing – but the owls still would not let me alone. As we headed on foot toward the Picasso museum and the Marais district via an astonishingly beautiful array of tree-lined avenues, we walked down rue Bonaparte. Owl sculptures and owl tapestries dotted the windows of the galleries that approached the École des Beaux-Arts. Jenny stopped in front of a shop named Le Chat Huant and demanded a translation – The Hooting Cat – a medieval French name for owl that probably derived from the fact that owls can look and sound a little like cats. When perched, the owl’s silhouette and demeanour can appear feline, especially those owls with cat-like feather tufts that stand up like two pointed ears. This appearance is no accident: the owl evolved its ear tufts to resemble predatory mammals in order to protect itself and frighten off other predators and competitors, including other owls during threat displays. At night the owl’s hooting can sound unsettlingly like the sound cats make during amorous encounters and territorial battles. This cat resemblance has not escaped many peoples and cultures: a common local name for owls in Finland is kissapöllö which means literally ‘cat-owl’. In Costa Rica a common name for owl is cara del gato (cat-face).

  The window of Le Chat Huant was bright with exquisitely painted fingernail-sized pottery owl totems. We resisted the shopping opportunity, crossed the river (passing the Tawny portrait once more) and headed for the Marais district. In the rue des Archives my attention was arrested by the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature. I left Jenny and my mother Shirley, who both needed second breakfast, and with them seated happily in a café I paid my 8 euros and entered one of the strangest interiors I have ever seen. Multiple wood-panelled rooms housed animal-themed exhibit after exhibit, from tapestries to stuffed wolves, boars and bronze antlers growing out of the ceiling. The owl room, however, was guarded by the imposing face of a yellow-eyed Snowy Owl. Lined with deep billows of green silk, this dark installation was conceived as a homage to Diana, goddess protector of night and of hunting. The uncannily feathered ceiling had assembled six spooky, feather-surrounded owl heads. The effect was that the whole appeared to be swamping the onlooker from above, a giant amalgamated feathered body with huge owl faces staring down, their porcelain eyes shining, disturbing and semi-human
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  Recently, patches of feathers had been mysteriously disappearing from the exhibit. Flemish artist Jan Fabre had to be called back to repair the naked patches. No human could have reached up to steal the feathers, the curator told me. In the end it was found to be acariens des plumes: feather mites! The mystery was solved. The installation had to be carefully repaired by the artist with feathers that were less prone to attack, and treated to make sure that there would be no repeat of the offending bald patches.

  In the first room of the Picasso museum in rue de Thorigny it dawned on me that as well as women, goats and bulls it turned out that Pablo Picasso had an intense attachment to owls. They were everywhere. In 1947 Michel Sima took a striking black-and-white picture of Picasso holding – guess what – his pet Little Owl. I used to live in France, and I visited these museums; how could I have forgotten all about this fascination? In the photo Picasso fondly holds his owl, named Ubu, cupped in one hand. He shows his pet to the camera as a proud owner, a look of tenderness around his brown eyes that renders his face rounded and owl-like.

  The story goes that Ubu had been found after he had become injured at the Chateau Grimaldi museum. He had broken his leg but fortunately the practical Picasso knew exactly how to fix it with a splint. Following the owl’s recuperation, he was kept in a cage in his kitchen, where he was well fed on house mice, and became a kind of muse for the artist. A great number of owl ceramics, pottery jugs, plates and vases, photographs and paintings featuring the owl ensued. A pair of Little Owls decorated a brass vase; owls peeped out from corners of the gallery, guarded doorways and watched over arches with a far from cute, slightly bleak and often threatening air, as if they captured all the moods of the artist. And he captured theirs, entered into their owl world, portraying their myth, indifference, aloofness, their concern only with one thing: the capture and dispatch of prey. It strikes me that this might be one truth about Picasso’s genius and his ideas, but also the truth about owls: their gaze lacks concern for the human world, always looking through or past us, and so we perceive them to be neutral, a canvas upon which we can impose our stories.