Owl Sense Page 16

  We leave the smiling schoolchildren and the old church with its owl-lined branches weighed down by soft and uncountable silhouettes and set course for Kikinda, only slightly better prepared for the safari to come.

  Our excitement rises as we enter the town. At the end of October every year in Kikinda there is an owl festival. Townspeople are beginning to feel proud, and want to share the importance of this gathering of owls. As far as we know, it is the largest manifestation of this creature in one place in the world. During the week-long celebrations of the owl festival, school children are educated about the owls, make owl art and sing owl songs. There is music and dancing. Owl poetry is created. Owl biscuits are baked. Owl posters go up. Owl stories are told. All in all, word has spread, and these owls are beginning to be cherished. Better still, groups of owl-aholics are visiting, bringing their long lenses, notebooks and binoculars, boosting the local economy, appreciating the local food and culture.

  As we arrive, Milan with a big smile dons an enviably silly hand-knitted owl hat. With a prominent bill and endearingly plaited orange, white and grey tassels, it makes him look like a rugby player with Viking plaits. There will be an opportunity to buy one later, he promises, noting our admiration and desire for similar souvenir headwear. A huge sign with a picture of a friendly owl made up of biscuits and cakes welcomes us like a good omen. We pull up in a street of elegantly designed eighteenth-century houses painted saffron yellow and salmon pink.

  ‘In Kikinda,’ Milan declares proudly as we pass the sign, ‘there is no mothership tree. Kikinda is the mothership.’

  We can hardly contain ourselves. There could be up to 800 owls in this one small town. Just the idea of the shadowy presence of all these owls is at once spooky and scintillating, as if we are walking onto the set of a horror film before filming has started.

  As we leave the minibus and make our way to the town square I notice how friendly the local people are. They are used to the tree-pointing, owl-counting foreigners by now, and don’t seem to mind this eccentric invasion. They appear to appreciate our presence, as it must bring in much-needed income to the ailing Serbian economy. Mostly there is a sense of ordinariness surrounding the presence of these creatures. People are used to them, and pass by no longer noticing the extraordinary thicket of eyes, claws and feathers within the branches above their heads. There is a heartening sense of tolerance, even over the messy layers of pellets and wall-to-wall white splashes on park benches, pavements and lawns. All this owl stuff appears to be viewed with resigned respect, good humour and a spirit of generosity. Would the people of St Ives, Bristol, Warrington or Aberdeen ever regard urban starlings, or declining populations of urban-dwelling herring gulls, with the same spirit of kindness? A smiling man in a thick overcoat, holding hands with a small child, approaches and speaks to us in Serbian, then in broken English, taking my arm and pointing to a tree.

  ‘In there, in there! More owl,’ he tells us enthusiastically, grabbing my hand. ‘And behind church!’ His warmth seeps into me.

  Obediently we all go to look, dispersing into the lawns and trees of the square, around the side of the lovely lemon-coloured church, and to the primary school where along the skyline and even at eye level just outside the chemistry labs owls are perched, gathered in loose bundles of ten, twenty, fifty. We strain our necks, peering up, counting.

  When in the town square I see one owl with something aluminium-coloured attached to its wing – this is one of the owls Milan has captured and ringed. He gets very excited; it is so close that we can read the number without binoculars. ‘A06! Yes! That one I ringed just last year!’

  Does he ever run out of owls to ring?

  ‘Sometimes. One year we got bored and ringed a whole load of blue tits. But they are vicious! The owls don’t mind it, but the blue tits! They turn their heads right round like a vampire and rip you! They’ll do anything to get blood. Sharp! Vicious! Blue tits are the worst.’

  Needing to give my own neck a rest, I wander away and find myself looking down, for a change, and notice I am standing amongst the largest, widest, deepest heap of owl pellets and white droppings that I have ever seen. I step forward, determined to collect one pellet and take it home. What exactly would the owls be eating, in the middle of winter, in this little-known southern European town close to the Hungarian and Romanian borders? What do they eat in the really cold years, when the rodents wear out?

  ‘Fucking blue tits,’ Milan laughs, when I ask him. ‘When we ringed all the blue tits, a month later what did we find? All the rings! In the owl pellets. Every last one!’

  Evidently, when small mammals run out, small birds are the next best thing.

  I step forward, and edge a little closer so that I am right beneath the canopy of the tall pine tree. I want to save and dissect a pellet, just one, from this huge pile, or perhaps two, and see for myself what they have been feeding on. No, first I would take a photograph of all the pellets with my small pocket camera. I had borrowed this ill-advised gadget from Rick, who used it to lend to his students in his job teaching in school. It was a pink flibbertigibbet of a thing, slim, and best of all, I thought, would fit easily into my coat pocket, like a spy camera. The Serbian police would not even notice it. I would swan through customs with it, and drift about innocently, whipping it out while nobody was looking. So I poised the camera to take a quick snap, not suspecting anything like the cataclysm it would cause.

  Understandably, there is a law in Kikinda about not disturbing the owls. Deploying my mammal-tracking skills honed through years of otter-chasing, which involve mostly looking down, I had not, as David repeatedly advised, looked up. Amongst the high and low branches, staring down at me, the owls must have been round-eyed at my clumsy intrusion into their pine-needle kingdom.

  Innocently, I point the camera. Perhaps, had they seen me, somebody in my group could have warned me. But they were busy looking up, deeply involved in counting more and more owls. They didn’t see what was about to happen.

  I am now close to the base of the pine tree, and hidden by a dense, sheltering canopy of deep green. In the midst of reassuringly calming, resin-scented needles, inside the tree’s cocoon, it is dark and silent. My feet crisp subtly on the carpet of needles, the layers of fresh, glistening poo and the soft, crinkly piles of pellets. Click goes the shutter, quietly. A slight delay, and then … the flash.

  The tree erupts. Silent, winged things scatter in every direction, their quiet downdraught displacing the air, the branches, the twigs, the falling needles. I stumble out into the dusk to see my birdwatching group standing aghast. One hundred owls, all of them flying from their perches at once, swooping around, looping, confused, blinking, orange-eyed and ghostly, up, down, around and away and then gradually dissolving again into the nearby trees.

  The next photo is an accidental one, a blurred field of grass, as I stumble within my own self-induced tornado of owls. It does not, however, capture the emotional maelstrom, and this is why I will never again carry a camera with me. Unless you are extremely experienced, cameras can get between you and the wildlife and spoil things. From now on, somebody more experienced with a lens can do the pictures.

  I had committed the ultimate infringement. I had forgotten to switch off the flash. David, Margaret, Nigel, Janet, Wing Lok, Lee and Milan were stony-faced. The first rule of Owl Trip: do not scare the owls. My walk of shame brought me back to my friends in a swirl of disapproval.

  When you look up into the branches of a tree in Kikinda, in November or December, you might see six or seven, maybe ten Long-eared Owls. But for every one that you can see, Milan tells us informatively (and too late for me), remember that there are ten more that you cannot see. And they are mostly watching you. This tree – he points at one – has the world record for holding one hundred and sixty-five Long-eared Owls.

  On the way back to our hotel, owl-fatigue begins to set in. We stop a final time. ‘I’ve got one more thing to show you,’ Milan says, enthusiasm swamping his otherw
ise sharp perceptions.

  ‘Not more owls.’

  Milan is exasperated. ‘It isn’t more owls.’

  It’s a restaurant. Our stomachs all give gurgles of approval at the magnificent old windmill that has been converted into a strangely owl-shaped restaurant. We pile in, starving, slightly hysterical. We order beers. After draining a large one Milan leans over to me and confides: ‘If you really want to attract owls, what you do is make sparrow sounds, like this,’ and he purses his lips and uses his hands in such a way that the beaks of a hundred sparrows open and begin singing from somewhere, not quite at the table but somewhere above it, thrumming and twittering like a frenzied throng of finches. A few diners look bewildered, glancing upward as if looking for a flock of birds manifested somewhere inside the room, and then, seeing nothing, go back to their food.

  ‘It sounds like panic, like there’s a predator coming after them, and the noise of so many sparrows like this attracts the owls,’ Milan adds. After another beer, I catch myself beginning to suspect him of possessing mysterious powers. With the success of the sparrow–predator impression, we encourage him to do his others. I want to hear the raven again. It sounds so guttural, gravelly and rasping and real, and, well, like a raven, it sends unnerving shivers down our spines. I close my eyes and see a raven gliding over a ravine. When we run out of birds, goaded by Wing Lok and Lee who have been showing their pictures of leopards, Milan does a jaguar. This is almost too much. Jaguars, it turns out, have a troublingly primal call that vibrates from the soles of the feet to the top of the scalp. Heat rises to my cheeks. This is the kind of sound that, although as jaguar-like as the bird sounds were bird-like, one might reserve for the privacy of the bedroom.

  Later, I fall into my bed blurred by delicious Serbian dishes: turkey stew and many cakes, all washed down with a variety of beers and animal sounds delivered in a Serbian accent. The night’s soundtrack has not entirely disappeared from my inner ears, when, lying back on my pillow, each time I close my eyes I see clusters of owls staring at me, ears erect, fiery eyes aglow. In the night I am woken repeatedly, fighting my duvet, confused by dreams infested with angry raptors and strange big cats.

  The next morning I wake with puffy eyes. Janet is knocking ever-so softly and politely on my door. ‘Miriam, are you OK?’

  I slide out of bed, stick my head around the door, hair all over the place. Have I been talking in my sleep?

  ‘It’s eight o’clock – we’re just about getting in the minibus,’ Janet whispers gently, noticing my state with barely concealed concern.

  My limbs feel as though I haven’t slept. I was up till midnight, then woke at 2 a.m., 4 a.m. and 6 a.m., rigid before the accusing orange eyes of many Long-eared Owls.

  The agreement had been that we would rise at 6.00 for a short owl walk around the grounds of the hotel, breakfast at 7.00, leave at 8.00 to make the most of the short daylight hours. I had skipped all that, having been with my own owls the whole night.

  Janet brings me a cup of tea and I struggle into my clothes. As we climb onto the bus, she pushes some pastries into my hand. I could kiss her. I do kiss her. She is a travel agent, from Bristol, and is used to this sort of thing.

  As we drive through the treeless Pannonian Plain I discover that Janet has been all around the world on trips just like this one. A thoroughly experienced veteran of these group trips, she must be familiar with the ‘one who oversleeps’. But there is more to Janet than that. She is, I also notice, exceedingly tactful and thoughtful about everybody else. The others are in couples, so thrown together by circumstance, she is happy to chat with me, and happy with silence. I notice that she does not talk about herself unless asked. I watch her looking out of the window. She has a guarded, reticent look about her as if she has had a loss, perhaps. Or maybe this is the best approach on a group tour. I do not ask, but, happy in our mutual passion for owls, we enjoy one another’s quiet company.

  ‘It’s weird – I’m an early riser usually,’ I tell her later, attempting to alleviate the shame of having been the one who held up the group.

  ‘Maybe my alarm woke you,’ she says, trying to remove any blame. ‘It did go off really early, and then maybe you went back to sleep.’

  But it isn’t just me; there were other goings-on around the hotel that morning. As Wing Lok and Lee with their formidable lenses stealthily patrolled the grounds at the 6 a.m. rendezvous, and owls flew about them, one had crashed loudly into the window of my room. It was unhurt, but as I passed I peered at the glass and found a light, ash-speckled feather, which I gathered up and slipped gently in between the pages of my notebook.

  Later that day, outside another beautiful but crumbling church, Milan and I find more feathers, but this time, Milan says, they have been plucked. This is a predator incident. A kill. It could have been a goshawk. Unusual in the town, he adds, but it could be. Long-eared Owls do not have many predators, but if goshawks flew into town and happened upon a roost they would be a serious threat. There are not many leaves left on the trees at all, and any sharp-eyed predator would easily notice a bunch of owls nervously exposed on the branches of a lime or plane tree.

  We cross the Danube, which is more muddy brown than blue. It swirls with grey cloud-reflections, like silty bathwater reflecting the open-skied expanses of this windswept land. With so few trees and a clear view from horizon to horizon, our eight pairs of eyes easily pick out any unusual birds, and we screech to a stop to view a great grey shrike, perched on a wire, watching over the field beyond. I gaze at the neat grey-and-white plumage of this striking bird with its creamy breast, stark black mask, cloud-grey back and long tail. I have never seen the Lanius excubitor, the so-called butcher bird, which lies in wait for beetles, small mammals and even birds, then skewers them and stores them in its grisly larder. As we look, a huge brown hare leaps out of the undergrowth and gallops away.

  ‘God, it’s the size of a cocker spaniel!’ Nigel says. Milan explains that hares are very big here in Serbia. There are good grasslands for them, but the grasslands are threatened. Each year more are ploughed up illegally.

  Thankfully, today we see more trees. I notice them mostly clinging to the sides of the rivers: white poplars, black poplars, alder; and in the fields, bare peach orchards and walnut trees. The endless sugar-beet fields are broken up by small farmsteads each with a strip of woodland, but all these tiny havens are dying out, Milan says, in favour of the large-scale exploitation we know about in the rest of Europe. It’s coming our way, he tells us sadly, and it won’t be good for the wildlife. Many of the tiny smallholdings we can see are people’s weekend houses, where in summer they go to tend vegetables and cut wood. The loss of these homesteads is not good for the wildlife, including the owls.

  For now, poverty and lack of development also mean that many people still use old bicycles and horses and carts for transport in rural areas. In the villages crowds of old men and women bustle about with their shopping baskets, to and fro on their bikes. In one where we stop at a bakery for lunch, a farmer dressed in overalls sees us admiring how many potatoes he has fitted into his car. They are balanced on the roof, stacked three sacks high, and in the boot, he shows us, as well as filling every seat inside. The car is so weighed down it looks as if he might scrape the underneath or get stuck on a bump in the road, but his worn hands and leathery skin show that he must have had years of practice. We have no Serbian, and he no English – in fact, Serbian may not even be the language he is speaking as this area is populated by a rich mixture of Hungarian-speaking and Balkan peoples, and in some villages three or even six languages may be spoken.

  This land is the European bridge to and from Asia Minor and the Middle East – it is used to comings and goings, to cohabitation and tolerance. Language barriers aside, this farmer wants to speak with us as we wait outside the bakery, and when we come out laden with pastries for lunch he demonstrates how hard he has been working all day, miming this way and that way, backwards and forwards to the market, up and
down these tree-lined roads, through the town, with his battered old East European car. We laugh together as he clowns himself bright-eyed and tearful, and we take pictures of his miraculous car, the car of a thousand potatoes, and we shake hands affectionately before he drives away to sell his teetering freight of root vegetables. We may not speak the same language, but laughter has no borders.

  Political, social and economic fortunes may have ebbed and flowed over this place, but the wildlife endures, rubbing alongside the people. Milan tells us that it is estimated that every year a couple of thousand hectares are illegally ploughed up, but the bird life demonstrates a kind of fluid resilience, even a permanence, which is not immediately obvious. The migrant birds, like migrant people, continue to flow through this place. The borders open, the borders close, but the birds know nothing of these artificial delineations. The bustle of human activity might benefit many animal and bird species, like the storks for instance, whose nests we can see on tall chimneys and towers, and the Long-eared Owls, who come for the urban trees, and the cranes that overwinter on the many lakes and fields of grass. But sometimes we may also drive out other species, which are then lost, like the great bustard, in a constant flux of tide and fortune.