Owl Sense Read online

  Owls have been part of our landscape, psychological context and emotional ecology from the moment Homo sapiens became self-aware. When the daily soundtrack of birdsong died down, we noticed the owl’s voice in the dark and felt puzzled and unsettled. The human brain is primed for curiosity and story, so owls invited in our myth-making. Now it is impossible to see these animals without clouding them with what anthropologist Franz Boas described as our Kulturbrille, a cultural lens that automatically colours the way we perceive everything. We observed owls’ hunting skills, noted their powerful sensory capacities and coveted their silent mastery of the air. They would have been and still are part of our spiritual system, that expanded along with our sense of identity as a species, our sense of our place in the world. Owls have found their way into our mythology, art, literature and religion and so appear to be polarised. On one side, the imaginary owl of the mind, the human-created spirit bird, the familiar, the icon, the owl as commodity. Looking at any of these, we are really only looking at ourselves. On the other side, the real, live animals that breathe and fly and hunt, and this owl is so often beyond our reach. However much we taint them with our own meanings, in art, in story, in photography and on screens, they still remain beyond us. Until relatively recently, the more we have tried to understand them through the prism of our own experiences, the more we have obscured their true nature.

  I wanted contact with the true nature of these birds. Encounter was what interested me, to observe the birds in the wild. To see some of the more elusive owls I needed specialists to guide me. I went in search of the people who could help. Unexpected friendships grew. My guides helped me find my owls – but they also taught me something else. I found that in the end any encounter between a wild owl and a human must always be tentative, aware of the assumptions we might wrongly make. Just as I would only ever be a small fragment of the owl’s landscape, I could only ever partially come to know owls. Learning that was a whole journey in itself.

  In the first century AD Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History:

  The eagle-owl is thought to be a very bad omen, being as it is a funereal bird. It lives in deserts and in terrifying, empty and inaccessible places. Its cry is a scream. If it is seen in a city, or during the day, it is a direful portent, though several cases are known of an eagle-owl perching on private houses without fatal consequences.

  I love that Pliny covers himself, carefully stating that some homes might occasionally be spared the fatal consequences.

  The irony is that most of the 250 species of owl on the planet evolved as forest birds, and since humans depend upon the planet’s forests to maintain our atmosphere, as we continue felling and burning we are spelling our own doom.

  Once we lived much more consciously within the ecosystem. Our lives were sensitive to the wild, entirely embedded amongst predator–prey relationships, and animals were respected as part of our lives in ways in which it is difficult for Western humans to remember or imagine. In December 1994 a group of three spelunkers, or cavers, were following an old mule path beside a cliff face along the Ardèche river in southern France, when they came face to face with an astonishing reminder of our connection to the animal world. They found a narrow slot in the rock of the cliff and climbing inside they felt a tiny current of air emanating from some rubble. The subtle breath from the rock could only mean one thing: there was an unexplored cave inside. They cleared the rubble and scrambled in. By the light of their lamps they found that the cave, larger than any they had seen before in the region, was scattered all over with the bones, scratch marks and wallows all from one extinct animal: the cave bear.

  Moving through the chambers of what came to be known as the Chauvet cave – named after one of the explorers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, who later wrote about it jointly with the other cavers – they found astonishing paintings. It began with red ochre dots and smudges made by the hands of Paleolithic artists, and as the chambers of the cave stretched out, for over 240 metres, they found each chamber contained new wonders. The red ochre was replaced by black, and these turned out to be the earliest paintings. In some places horses and bison had been engraved in the soft surfaces of the cave walls, perhaps scratched with a human finger. Small fragments of charcoal were lying about where they had been knocked from the artists’ torches as if they were still fresh. A mammoth, a leopard, and soon a whole pantheon of animals danced across the walls, and their forms felt vibrant enough to be recent. The artists had used the uneven surface of the rock as if the animals were emerging from it.

  ‘Suddenly our lamps lit upon a monumental black frieze. It took our breath away. There were shouts of joy and bursts of tears. We felt gripped by madness and dizziness,’ the cavers later wrote in their book Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave. They were staring at a panel that had been scraped clean and worked into a scene of a dozen hunting lions, their heads deftly shaded, their eyes alive and intelligent, their bone-structure and musculature clearly delineated. These were familiar, intimate portraits. The expressions of the lions as they stalked were varied and well-observed. Carbon dating showed that the first of these paintings had been begun around 36,000 BC. They were far older than anything previously discovered. The bears, bison, reindeer, cave lions, rhinoceros, horses and mammoths had been depicted by artists who were skilled and attentive. The graceful depictions were accurately and lovingly rendered and showed that the artists must have worked calmly and reverently. Were these devotional images? Returning from the deepest part of the cave where the lions reside, and looking back into it, in a place where the floor had collapsed so that it was now unreachable, the cavers noticed that on the ceiling there was engraved a striking solitary figure of a Long-eared Owl.

  The Chauvet owl is the oldest known depiction of an owl in the world. It is 45 centimetres tall – close to the size of a large Long-eared Owl, Asio otus. It has clearly etched ear tufts, and is perched on a downward-drooping rock pendant. Most interestingly, its back is shown facing outwards, wings folded, with fifteen streaks to demarcate the densely lined plumage. This closely observed owl is depicted as if swivelling its head 180 degrees backward to peer into the dark, its face turned to look out into the cave and meet the gaze of the people walking towards it. To portray it thus, the real animal must have been watched many times and its skill noted. In view of the sophistication of the other drawings, the deliberate positioning of the bird suggests the artists understood something of the Janus nature of the owl, its troubling liminal status on the boundaries of light and dark. This owl captures a strange suggestion, its ability to face both ways, both out into the cave and back into the body of the rock and whatever that was thought to be concealing, as if the rock were merely a veil.

  We cannot know exactly what the owl meant to those artists, only guess that they perhaps trusted that it would be meaningful – a helpful companion perhaps, or a guardian in these deepest reaches of the dark. Humans are the loneliest of creatures amongst all the earth’s species, self-consciously and visibly a species apart. But when they hunted for food every day for their survival, our ancestors must have known their prey intimately. They would have gazed into the anatomy of their prey animals and experienced the resemblance. On the outside we may look different, but on the inside it is clear that in some way we are related – there is a common ancestor, somewhere way back – and in peering into the entrails and skeletons of the birds, early humans may have felt recognition. The organs, the spine, the ribcage, the breastbone; the arm-like wings with fingery tips; the hips joined to the legs, the toes; all, at their core, relate to and reflect our own human structure.

  This unspeaking kinship with animals may have drawn us, or certain of us, more companionably into the dark unknown recesses of the caves, as well as into the deepest recesses of our imaginations. Looking at the Chauvet cave masterpieces, where animals appear to spring from clefts and cleaves in the rock, perhaps here was a place where we felt we could call them up out of the ground. We can never know for sure, but it might be her
e that humans started to fit these animals with symbolic thoughts and began to use them as metaphor. They became useful as a way of explaining the world. Was it from this point onwards, with the slow appropriation humans excel at, that the exploitation of animals began? At first they might have been respected as unspeaking companions and beings that were meaningful in ways humans have forgotten now. They would have seemed magical, both mortal – as they could die – and immortal as new identical members of their kind seemed to reappear and carry on. Later they were raw material to be used, subjugated and also silenced.

  With the advent of medieval Christianity, animals became fair game for teachings that justified religious beliefs. Owls were dirty and slothful, according to Benedictine Abbot Hrabanus Maurus in De Rerum Naturis, written in the year 847 AD. He intended this encyclopedia as a handbook for preachers, stating that owls cry out when they feel that someone is going to die: ‘He flees from the light, in the sense that he does not look for the glory of human praise,’ Maurus tells us. Unpleasant, anti-Semitic connotations abounded in the illustrations of his owls. During this period, strange images of owls in religious artworks such as illustrated bestiaries and sculptures were often given a human face with a prominent hooked beak to denote the supposed long, hooked nose of the Jews. Scenes of the owl being mobbed by other birds were common in the medieval manuscripts – and in reality wild birds do call in alarm and mob owls as they threaten to predate their nestlings. To some medieval minds the mobbing was punishment for being a night-creature that shunned God’s light. The owl was often carved on misericords in medieval churches and monasteries. Here too they were portrayed as being attacked by other birds as if they were sinners condemned by righteousness. As monks sat down on these misericords they would be doing Christ’s work by robustly squashing the evil.

  Owl symbols abound in the darkly imaginative Renaissance paintings of Hieronymus Bosch (1450–1516). There are very few paintings by this artist that do not contain a hiding owl. Bosch’s owls might not be malevolent, however, and are sensitively depicted. It is as if they are merely supervising the action in the paintings, not taking part in it. As a creature that can see in the darkness where others are blind, contrary to medieval Christian views, for Bosch the owl might in fact be seen as bringing light to darkness. His tiny owls often peep out, watching wherever there is a human committing a sin or misbehaving in any way. In The Garden of Earthly Delights and many of the other paintings, owls appear embroidered in some item of clothing, hidden in a pocket, sitting in a basket, peering from a windowsill, in a tree, fountain or vase, everywhere and anywhere, ubiquitous watching eyes. Art historians have been discussing the meaning of Bosch’s owls ever since. Far from symbols of wickedness, they seem to be symbolic observers, meditative representations of the esoteric teachings Bosch was party to, representing mystery and meditation, a consciousness or conscience bigger than our own.

  None of the critics suggest that these owls are whimsical; they seem to be deliberate. The Pygmy Owl and the Barn Owl – the varieties Bosch most often depicted – were known to be frequently out in daylight, and were looked upon more favourably at the time. The Pygmy Owl, often diurnal, has a pleasant flute-like hoot and in France it was said to be benevolent, and especially lucky company for travellers. The Barn Owl had domestic aspects, and was a familiar companion that lived close to our dwellings and destroyed vermin. The ingenious Bosch was evoking complex thoughts about the solitary contemplator. The clear-sighted, meditative, wise bird that remained in its quiet nook in the brickwork (or cell) all day was like a monk. The owls were thoughtfully placed to bear witness to the human misdemeanours happening elsewhere in the paintings.

  Albrecht Dürer’s melancholy portrait of a deep-eyed young Tawny speaks of a surge of sympathy in his 1508 depiction The Little Owl. This delicate watercolour sensitively traces something of how the artist feels about the captive owl. Instead of dissecting it or using it as a Christian vessel, in fine detail he catches particular aspects and distils an elusive essence of owl-ness. The large eyes with fathom-dark pupils and the sharply hooked claws, the soft, brownish-grey camouflage, all show well-observed traits of this young, nocturnal predator. Fragile lines trace the long primary feathers and the softer down on the owl’s breast. The fierce young bird is captured in an alert yet thoughtful moment, and with its claws spread wide on a man-made surface, its wings furled, it poignantly suggests that this young owl has all his life ahead. The wild creature’s isolation from nature in a captive environment suggests that Dürer felt the potential of the creature yet disapproved of the cultural appropriation or caging of it, and cared about more than the simple appearance and received ideas of owls. It is caught in a poignant, vulnerable pose and its predatory power appears locked up as if it cannot wait to be its simple, natural self and fly free.

  As our representation of owls proliferated, we continued to cage them with our human ideas and misconceptions, and now in the twenty-first century they are often literally caged. Since the phenomenon of Harry Potter where owls were often depicted as glamorous companions they are increasingly popular and often desired as pets. In Britain their breeding in captivity is regulated and they are sold by falconry specialists, but increasingly second-hand owls are easy to come by online. Across the world an unintended effect of Harry Potter has spread with the books’ fame. With its translation into many languages and vastly popular films, and alongside the rise of social media, special interest pet owl groups have proliferated. In Java and Bali where bird markets are widespread and owls are not protected, wild-caught owls are commonly sold as pets. The Pramuka market, the largest in Jakarta, may often have up to sixty owls for sale, with eight different species on show at a time. In Indonesia it is traditional to keep birds as domestic pets, but previously ‘Burung hantu’ or ‘ghost birds’ were feared and avoided. Now the ghost bird is called a ‘Burung Harry Potter’ and prices are rising for the rarer owls as more and more people wish to own one. The loss of these unprotected apex predators from the wild must be interfering with fragile ecosystems, imperiling the conservation of rare species, as well as causing distress to the captive owls. A 2017 research survey by the Oxford Wildlife Trade Research Group found many species now being sold freely in the Far East: the Javan Owlet, the Bornean Wood Owl, the Buffy Fish Owl, the Australasian Barn Owl, and many Scops owls were noted, and still more species were unidentifiable due to poor light conditions, feather damage or the owls being sold as chicks or juveniles.

  Framed in cages, in high resolution on our TV screens or in closely filmed nature documentaries, owls present a paradox. The binary distinction between owls as cute and owls as sinister can make them appear as ferocious as they are fascinating. While the reptilian burn of their gaze still seems to suggest that our mortal existence is of little significance, in Hollywood films their chill call foreshadows some ghoulish turn in the plot. At the same time, in the world of consumerism the owl has been reduced to an item to collect, sequestered for a companion, a cutesy fashion accessory, or printed on crockery and clothing. Owl toys are obsessively hoarded and displayed. The owl has become an ‘experience’, a collectible, a postcard, and a pin-up.

  Where, amongst all this, is the real owl?

  One afternoon in March I walked away from the houses of our suburbia and into the overgrown green lane in the next valley. It was windy, the eye-watering wind that bites, but the downward drift pulled my feet into a steady rhythm. The undulating ground felt like a great sleeping animal, and there was some energy rising out of it that lent the mind some balance. Common polypody, ivy and hart’s tongue ferns covered the banks and clattered in the breeze; above my head crows tumbled and flapped and the wind tossed all the sound up like flotsam. In the mud there were badger tracks, then some fox prints and after that, the slim slots of a roe deer. I began to feel the deep humanness of the track, a thousand years of passage, all the human and animal feet that had weathered it into this eroded way opened by roots and water and footfall.

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bsp; I thought of the huge lone oak standing in the middle of the field, still dignified, squeezed between the tremendous mounds of earth that would soon be marked on the map as the new development being built close to our house: ‘The Camomile Lawns’. Somehow, long ago, in the midst of the rough pasture of the field, in spite of the grazing noses of cattle, its acorn managed to take its chances and sprout. My mind ranged through its elephantine stature and its gnarly bark, imagining its thousand dependants: its fungal, algal and plant inhabitants, its ferns, beetles, wasps and lacewings; its birds, bats, shrews and other small mammals. We live in the company of intricate and complex systems.

  ‘The Camomile Lawns’. My trust wavered each time I walked back past the sign, its veneer created by some faraway corporation. The field is being developed as I write, earth moved in tremendous heaps, sifted and flattened. By the time you are reading this, the town will have grown, and one hundred houses been built for human families. The whole town is expanding, quite suddenly, and hundreds of homes are being built in different locations all around its edges. People need homes, and they need the green amongst them. The same developments are happening in many places. But neon glow and street lighting will rise at night where before there were pools of darkness. Unless it is provided for, the wildlife will have to adapt, or leave.

  Tyto alba

  BARN OWL