Owl Sense Page 12
I went back to look at the photo of Ubu. In the Sima photograph of the artist, three monochrome forms, like inverted teardrops, created a harmonious trio. The central teardrop, the actual owl, held close to the man’s large-eyed, owl-shaped face on the right, drew attention to the striking similarity of the eyes. Then there was the third: only just out of focus on the left was the self-portrait as an owl with its piercing vision loitering in the background. It was almost as if we were seeing into the artist’s mind, the symbolic owl making manifest an inner and an outer wisdom, its sharp-eyed gaze staring out from beneath brows that were darkly precise and yet familiar. In another painting, Le Hibou de la Mort, 1952, Picasso even traced his own name, begun with a cryptic ‘P’ hidden within the owl’s wing.
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The day before the wedding we visited Christine and Marianne’s house in their village outside Paris, and right inside the front door, on the sideboard, somebody had left the barred primary feather of an owl. I saw it as soon as I walked in. Immediately I picked it up to scrutinise it: ‘Une Cheveche,’ Christine told me. A Little Owl.
I stared at it, no longer astounded by the flood of coincidence. She saw the pair most nights, she told me, perched on the rooftop opposite in her street. That night in our hotel deep in the French countryside I vividly dreamt again of being alone in the house with a tame Little Owl. This time it perched in my kitchen, bathed in a bowl of water, and ravenously hungry, called repeatedly to be fed.
The next day was the wedding. Christine and Marianne stood side by side looking preened and immaculate. Around her dark brown curls I could see that Christine was trembling. I signed the witness papers as we watched our friends shyly acknowledge their love and commitment. Finally with this ceremony we were allowed to witness them, celebrate seeing them openly after all these years. We stood in a wide, appreciative, semicircle of family and emotion. Christine’s mother was not there, nor was one sister. But another sister was, coincidentally named Myriam, and afterwards she clasped me appreciatively. We all applauded while the Beatles rang out with ‘All You Need is Love’. I didn’t want the moment to end. Suddenly knowing that we had gained a new family, waiting outside the village hall for the music and dancing to begin, I bent down to pick up another darkly barred primary feather.
I tucked it into the smooth card of my wedding invitation and slid it in my bag. Later, as we sleepily looked at the feather in our hotel after the festivities, I decided there was something special about it. It was deeper gold than the feathers of the Barn Owls at home, and darker brown, with a slate-grey tip. It could have been the continental species Tyto alba guttata, the Dark-breasted Barn Owl. There are plenty of them around, Christine told me later, her arm sweeping over the view of sun-kissed fields, drying sunflowers, apple orchards and small farms.
Tyto alba guttata is found in France but does not generally occur naturally in the UK. In fact, it has been found from Southern Sweden (where now it is thought it might be extinct) through Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Western Russia, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland and Bulgaria. The birds are variable in appearance but classically guttata are generally the dark twin of our ‘common’ or ‘white-breasted’ Tyto alba. They have deep, richly buff underparts that can appear as a complete covering of gold rather than the white front, legs and undertail coverts of Tyto alba. Alba sometimes has buff tints over the upper breast and sometimes even the lower but the buff in guttata is encompassing and always extends over the feathered tarsi, or legs, and over the undertail coverts. Guttata is often clearly speckled on the breast, the speckles often extending all the way down the tummy. Any bird showing a contrast between dark breast and pale underbelly is not true guttata.
The face is different too: the buff colour is visible as a dark surround radiating in the facial disc of guttata, particularly around the eyes, giving it a strikingly shadowy, smudged purple-brown mascara look. Females may appear even darker here than males. A key feature of a classic guttata is the abundance of silvery grey marbling on the crown and back or ‘scapulars’ and this can extend to the primary flight feathers which have clear grey tips, and their bold dark barring extends all the way across the feather on the outer primaries, a pattern which is not usually found in Tyto alba. However, it is not always a clear distinction between the two: a 500-kilometre-wide transition area has been identified across Europe where alba and guttata interbreed, birthing young that are ‘intergrades’ between the two, making identification challenging.
Would we ever see one of these lovely specimens in Britain? A female guttata did breed in East Anglia in 2008, and it is thought that vagrant guttata have been found in the parts of Britain closer to the Continent, mostly in East Anglia, but how many there might be is not confirmed. In any case, the warmer, drier climate here in France just south of Paris, coupled with the rich patchwork of farmsteads, meadows, orchards and woodland edges, is an ideal habitat for many owls, most especially Barn Owls, but also Tawnies and Little Owls, far better than the rainswept, unpredictable and intensively farmed conditions in south-west England. Christine tells me that she has seen Long-eared Owls here in the protected forest around the chateau, and Eagle Owls can sometimes turn up. As for the Barn Owls, it is the dark kind she often sees, she tells me, but whether it is mostly guttata or an intergrade around here, we cannot be sure. The feather, I check later, has a faint grey tip: I think it is guttata.
*
‘Can we have an owl?’ Benji asked me again when we returned home and I showed him my pictures of Ubu, Picasso’s owl. We went to visit Flitwick again, the rescued Little Owl that lives in the animal sanctuary nearby.
‘I really don’t think they make good pets.’
Pete, who works at the sanctuary, showed us Lady Jane Grey, his Great Grey Owl. The difference in size between the two species was outrageous. The Great Grey is 70 centimetres tall, the Little Owl around 20 centimetres. Lady Jane blinked, somewhere deep in her gizzard a crush of bone and skull compressing. She could have squashed Flitwick like a ripe blackberry. Being ladylike doesn’t mean anything in owl-dom. Flitwick looked at us with indifference. About the size of a songbird, she seemed to have no idea how tiny she was.
Benji spent a large amount of time stroking Flitwick with the back of his index finger. For him, the owl conceded and closed her eyes. Did she enjoy the contact? She could simply be reacting to the preening by protecting her eyes, fearful, or hoping for food. Her closed eyelids were soft and feathered.
‘You should come to Owl Club,’ Pete encouraged. ‘There’s usually an owl going.’
I felt Benji’s ears prick up.
‘Owls are wild,’ I said as we walked home. ‘We can’t have one.’
But still, that inter-species contact with Flitwick had left him enthralled, as if the alien, aloof animal was showing him some acceptance. And even if she was just resigned, it still felt like a privilege, as if we’d been singled out for company by a creature that seems so perfect, so well-evolved, so self-contained, that they are usually reluctant to allow us anything. Perhaps that’s the wild-animal effect. They don’t need us, they don’t want us, so when they allow us to get close, consciously or unconsciously, it feels precious, exhilarating. It brings us into the present, into the perfect moment, time outside time when beings can just be. And owls are the most stunning example of this. Watch people’s faces light up when they get close to one, captive or otherwise. The effect is entrancing.
*
A Little Owl had been calling in the old apple orchard near my home. At least I thought it must be a Little Owl. We stopped one evening to listen, the dog looking up at us, curious. An eerie truncated hoot, deeper than that of a female Tawny Owl, was ringing around the apple trees, rising at the end of its note with a questioning, melancholy air. Tawny calls are so distinctive, usually the ‘keewicck!’ shriek of the female and the ‘hu-hooo’ reply of the male. But this was clearly a different owl. ‘Keeooow,’ it said. ‘Keeooow.’ I tuned in my ears, acclimatised to the mournful ph
rase. It floated, repeating like a question thrown out into the dusk.
When I searched for a Little Owl expert, straight away Dr Emily Joáchim, who had just completed her PhD on Little Owls, popped up. Here was the Little Owl advocate behind the Twitter handle I had found: @UKLittleOwls. Emily began the UK Little Owl Project because Little Owls have declined by 65 per cent in the UK in just twenty-five years. There is so much we do not know about this declining species. To research and preserve it, Emily invites people to record their Little Owl sightings nationally as part of her project. The project is an inspired piece of joined-up thinking: the kind that brings together citizen science and academic research in order to rescue a species. Without the countrywide fund of information Emily was collecting we might never find out what it is that is causing this wonderful owl to vanish. ‘The owls are disappearing and we don’t know why,’ she tells me. ‘It could be climate change or something else – we don’t yet know – but in all likelihood it could be for a number of different reasons such as habitat changes, increased insecticide use, and more competition for nest sites and food.’
Emily has researched breeding biology since 2008 (Little Owls have a habit of nesting in unusual places as I had discovered: rabbit burrows, piles of rubble, stone walls, derelict buildings). She has studied dispersal behaviour, diet and feeding behaviour, and crucially has set up nest-box cameras, and recorded video footage. Year on year, working with other experts, including the photographer Andy Rouse, she is learning more about Little Owl ecology. By looking at long-term data sets, monitoring individual pairs and linking their breeding productivity with habitat, she may soon know more than anyone about this small predator.
Little Owls in this country, it appears, are often attracted to equestrian centres and riding stables. The mixed grazing, mature trees, hedges and horse dung all provide good habitat and feeding. Emily’s study of Little Owls has been centred across south Wiltshire, for example in Tytherington just south of the Salisbury plain where a few pairs have been attracted to nest. Loss of mixed farmland with hedgerows, long and short grass, and a sharp decline in insects due to the use of pesticides are thought to have hastened the Little Owl’s disappearance. But here, where there is a healthy mixture of grazing, hedges and mature trees, as well as long fences with many posts and nearby heaps of fly-attracting dung (even though Emily tells me they have significantly declined in Wiltshire), I know I am more likely to see a Little Owl.
‘We were down to ten breeding pairs in our boxes in 2017, from twenty-three pairs in 2000,’ Emily informs me with some concern. She has been tirelessly spreading the word about the mysterious decline of the Little Owl with her research work and her talks, as well as a particularly fabulous website, http://www.littleowlproject.uk, dedicated to Little Owl research and conservation in the UK. The sharing of information is always crucial with this kind of project, and needing to see a big picture other experts and enthusiasts have joined together and compared their research findings. ‘With similar work in other counties, such as Little Owl nest-box projects run by Bob Danson in Lancashire, Alan Ball and Bob Sheppard in Lincolnshire, Vincent and Gary Cartwright in Oxfordshire, and Roy Leigh in Cheshire to name but a few, we regularly contact each other to share our Little Owl news and to do the best we can for them,’ Emily emphasises, showing how truly this work is a joint effort.
Her Little Owl Project website is peopled with Andy Rouse’s exquisite images of this highly photogenic, defiant-looking bird. Catching on, local landowners have joined the crusade and put up hundreds of nest boxes. ‘You can’t just put a nest box anywhere,’ Emily tells me. ‘Little Owls, like Barn Owls, are creatures of habit and extremely site-loyal. You have to put up a nest box where you know there is a Little Owl otherwise it will be a waste of everybody’s time.’
And it’s not always easy to know where the Little Owls are. There’s an element of mystery about them due to their mainly nocturnal behaviour. But hearing a Little Owl (and verifying the call correctly) counts as a sighting, says Emily, and so I could register my sighting and the calling owl I heard on the database on her website. There appear to be far fewer Little Owls in the west of England now, and this needs to be investigated. My evidence would be useful, and this kind of sighting is often shared between county bird groups. It strikes me how apt it is that hearing an owl counts as much as seeing one, as owls themselves rely on their ‘earsight’ for locating prey during their nocturnal forays. But how does this ‘earsight’ work?
The owl’s sense of hearing is prodigious due to astonishing adaptations within the structure of its ear. Part an owl’s feathers and you’ll see not the usual small round opening that most birds have but large half-moon-shaped vertical slits. These are very deep and the outer ear is wide enough to insert a fingertip into (not that you would want to). The slits are surrounded by the stiff feathers of the facial disc, and skin flaps or conchae can be erected at will to capture and funnel sound. The inner ear of the owl also makes a big difference: it is large enough to contain many more nerve cells than most birds. All this aural dexterity enables owls to scan parts of their surroundings in the same way that some mammals can move their external ears. This, combined with its asymmetrically placed ears means the owl can locate and pinpoint the exact position of its prey even beneath thick snow or in total darkness. It isn’t that the owl can see in the dark; it is that with a combination of knowledge of its surroundings, acute visual acuity in low light and its extreme sensitivity to sound, the owl can bob its head and create a mental map to help it locate its prey. Earsight.
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I couldn’t believe, with people like Emily working to promote this small owl, that it would be allowed to vanish. ‘Every encounter with them is exciting,’ she enthused to me. ‘Their wonderful frowning expressions and quirky behaviour – especially the way they run about and hunt on foot like a little person – makes it a pleasure to observe them, whether it’s watching them sunbathe on a warm summer afternoon, or quietly hunting at dusk.’
In the interests of conservation science, Emily has monitored the entire breeding cycle of these owls, recording the most intimate scenes with nest cams. From mating to egg laying, hatching and fledging, with all the thrills and spills in between.
‘The owls begin to breed in mid to late April,’ Emily told me. ‘I’m always amazed at how brave and hardworking the parents are when rearing their young. The mother incubates the hatchlings almost continuously for their first five days. At this point they’re covered in white down and their eyes are closed. They can’t thermo-regulate so they rely on their mother to keep them warm and huddle up together if she briefly leaves the nest site. The father owl does most of the hunting at this stage. He hunts mainly at dusk and during the night, and slows down at dawn. They are extremely devoted, with the male flying in and out of the box continually with prey items whilst the mother does most of the provisioning.’
When I met Emily she was giving a talk to a group of enthusiasts, and she showed pictures and video footage of the nest boxes. Little Owls readily nest in these specially designed boxes, but each must be placed high enough and the nest opening must be small enough to prevent predators from entering. The females lay their clutches of nearly spherical white eggs on consecutive days; they can lay up to six or seven, although on average will lay only three or four. After hatching, in a few days we can see the juveniles begin to try to stand on their talons, but they remain very wobbly at this stage and can only walk a few steps. When juveniles are seven days old, their down changes from white to pale grey and they start to look like proper owlets. Their talons and tarsi (ankles) are continuing to develop and they are a bit steadier on their feet now. The mother has to hunt more to keep up with the juveniles’ increasing food demand, and prey items might include moths, amphibians, worms, small mammals, and small birds such as sparrows and other finches. One birdwatcher who lived close to the seashore claimed they impacted on populations of little terns, and a farmer found a nest site covered in the le
gs of skylarks. Little Owls are also thought by some to benefit from all sorts of carrion, although generally this is not believed to be the case, but they will often take ground beetles – the floor of one Little Owl nest box that I inspected whilst working with the Barn Owl Trust contained exclusively many hundreds of beetle cases.
To demonstrate one of the threats to Little Owls, Emily showed the group a dramatic video. In it a camera showed the female in the nest with her four white eggs. A Barn Owl flew in and somehow squeezed itself along the narrow tunnel and through to the small nest box. The cornered mother Little Owl rose up and fought fiercely to defend her eggs, and the larger owl (which looked at least three times the size) retreated, causing a shiver of sympathy and relief amongst Emily’s audience. But it got worse: just as it seemed they were safe, the Barn Owl returned a week later when the young had hatched. Again, the female Little Owl bravely defended her young from the attack of the much larger owl, but unfortunately this time he took one chick and injured another. Emily told the startled audience that two chicks survived to fledge, miraculously, a testament to the fortitude and sturdy parenting of this tiny owl.
Mark Avery, writer, environmentalist and former conservation director for the RSPB, has pointed out that because Little Owls are an introduced species they are not always popular with NGO charities, nor are they on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) green, amber or red lists that categorise the conservation status of species. If they were, Avery suggests in his blog entry ‘Little Owls – would you miss them?’, they would be amber listed (declining) and possibly heading for red (threatened). In response to his blog, other enthusiasts have contended that the Little Owl may be present but simply going unrecorded, and in places like South Leicestershire and the Huntingdonshire fens they may be locally more common than is thought. However, as Emily points out, overall, they have been assessed as in ‘rapid decline’ by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO): ‘So we do need a new survey. There may be hot spots, but we need more information!’