Owl Sense Read online

  What would it be like, to have bones filled with a mesh of air, wings that could spread and float the body out onto miles of nothing? Neither the owlet nor I knew anything of this.

  With one hand grasping it I started to climb, my fingers stretching for holds in the stone. I dropped back down; I needed two hands. The owlet fitted inside my shirt along with a suspicious, parasitical tickling. Perhaps I needn’t have plopped it down next to my skin, but sometimes you just have to keep going. With both hands free I could get up there more easily. At the ledge, I undid the tangled claws from me, pushed the fallen owlet back with the others, and let go.

  I stepped quickly away from the hissing owls and all the stories of hauntings rose in my mind. You can see how the superstitions grew: the owl was a night bird, it came upon you silently, startling out of the mist or moonlight. Its white wings seemed to magnify its size and weirdness. Its appearance must have felt like a visitation. Above all, its awful screech around church towers, belfries and graveyards must have frightened the life out of people. But right now it just seemed as though the poor creature needed help. I withdrew rapidly. All an owl wants is to be left in peace, to make its living, to bring up its young safely and without disturbance, to continue the bloodline. Not so different from us, really.

  But any sentimentality or cutesy image we might harbour today for this heart-faced killer can be dismissed with a look into the habits of those hissing youngsters. When they are first born, they are bald and bristly, the most unattractive babies that only a mother could love. Even after two weeks when they have grown down, these snowy, powder-puff bundles have been witnessed – thanks to the nest cams we inquisitive humans have set up – standing on a cache of slaughtered voles that the devoted parents catch ceaselessly and pile up in case of lean times. Worse still, the parents have laid their eggs at intervals, so when there is little to eat, the larger chicks may pick on and bully the smaller ones. Sometimes, if there is not enough food forthcoming, they might devour their weaker, more recently hatched siblings, swallowing them down whole.

  *

  September arrived with cool air and departing swallows. My teaching was about to begin. Lectures planned and papers written, my own taken to school and to college; the dog walked, the washing-up mostly done, the emails answered. It should all have been fine, but there was the niggling worry about Benji. While I had been out owling, commuting, living, Benji had been going downhill.

  The family was seated around the kitchen table. It was Saturday lunchtime and I was serving spaghetti. There was fresh parmesan and chopped parsley. Jenny brought a jug of iced water. She had cut a chunk of lemon and dropped it in. We had made a salad of lettuce with toasted pine nuts. Everything was just right. Benji held out his plate, then put it back down before I had time to fill it. I stood, spaghetti spoon in hand, and watched his head drop and his body list to one side. Everything goes into slow motion. Benji is listing, like a ship going down. I shake his shoulder but his face is odd, as if he’s lost all motor control. Is he breathing? His head is twitching, but he is still breathing normally. Before we can do anything, he begins to slide out of his chair and drop to the floor.

  In the time it took for us to work out that Benji was not fooling, Jenny’s chair scraped on the floor as she fled the room in fright.

  Benji’s eyes swivelled. He couldn’t speak, or move. A thin line of saliva came from the corner of his mouth. His breathing was laboured. His lungs were being crushed. Suddenly I was trying to remember the first-aid class we did when he was a tiny baby. Which way was the recovery position? How do we move him? Do we call an ambulance? As a nervous new parent, I had taken first-aid courses. But that was long ago when Benji seemed so frail that I still feared at night that his breath might simply stop. Now he was a muscular 6 foot, and weighed in at 16 stone.

  We got him into the recovery position, and then we noticed he could blink. Could he communicate with blinking? We crouched to see into his eyes. Are you comfortable? One blink, obviously meaning ‘No.’ Is there anything you need? Two blinks: ‘Yes.’ Do you want an ambulance? Two blinks.

  Benji lay on his stretcher and his powers of movement slowly returned. Any fuss would send him back into the seizure. Was it epilepsy? Early onset narcolepsy? While we waited for the tests, for the MRI scans and the EEGs and then later the sleep-deprived EEGs, his head and shoulders wired with a dizzying array of coloured wires and nodes, I needed to hear something solid, over the flapping inside my head. Beside the perma-drone of worries, I needed to slow down. We needed to slow down.

  On the good days, we tried to carry on as normal. When we went out, I took an emergency foil blanket with me to wrap around Benji just in case. It wasn’t epilepsy, they told us, even though that was what it looked like. We stopped the driving lessons in any case because of course they were not safe any more.

  We could still go together on foot to look at the owls. Sometimes when there were two we tried to tell them apart. From our bird books we found that females often have darker markings, but that’s not always true – these creatures can frequently challenge our wrong-headed assumptions. So often, an assumption becomes an anecdote, and then it becomes fact, which of course it is nothing of the sort. Owl feeding habits had once been the subject of much speculation and debate, especially amongst gamekeepers and landowners with a living to protect. Speculation became knee-jerk reaction, and owls were shot. That was until the evidence, in the form of pellets, was dissected – owl stomachs are less acidic than other birds of prey, so contain more concrete evidence of their ‘savagery’ than other raptors. These were useful birds, it turned out. The pellets were full of rodent bones. They were controlling vermin as effectively as a cohort of cats.

  While Benji stayed at home through the winter I conversed with my students on how and how not to become better writers, answered their questions, commented on their essays, but in the background, a small chasm had opened up, and it was deepening. Benji could have various treatments, but he had had to permanently give up his house-building and carpentry plans. Scaffolding was not a safe place to be any more, and using power tools was not recommended. Sometimes what you thought was solid begins to melt away. No more college; Benji was staying at home.

  In the months that followed the advent of Benji’s unpredictable illness, the family gained a new attentiveness, a kind of listening sensitivity. When I slept, vertiginous moments took hold; I shocked myself awake and lay in a cold film of sweat. For a moment before I opened my eyes, just for a second I had thought that I could control my descent with feather-light wings. Light sleeping, and then full-blown insomnia, crept into my nights: in the twilight hours I was becoming owl-like.

  Benji’s seizures came every day now. While we fussed about what to do, he wasn’t recovering. He fell at the slightest thing. We were living in a strange state of continual alert. For a moment we might not notice anything, then one of us would perceive the quiet from his end of the room, or a thump, and he was gone. We needed to remain calm and focused, to listen to the medics, and to him, but while none of us fully understood what was going on, I was living with a ball of barbed wire in my stomach.

  *

  The Barn Owl’s hearing is so accurate it should be called ‘earsight’. Deploying what science calls its ‘enhanced auditory-spatial awareness’, some of the areas of the owl’s brain that process sound and the parts that process visual information are interconnected. The resolution and topographic precision produced in Barn Owls exceed those of any other species studied. This super-powered owl aids its earsight by bobbing, dipping and turning its head so that its sound scanner – the facial disc – can capture sound waves and transport the faintest of whispers to the hearing apparatus – the asymmetrical ears. Cute YouTube films of young owls performing this dance are actually demonstrating how owlets learn to use their prodigious hearing. With the head-bobbing an accurate picture of what is around can be created in the owl’s brain and it can decide what action to take. I knew that owls’ audit
ory accuracy was almost as precise as bats’ echolocation, but I still wanted to find out more.

  In order to establish the precise powers of the owl’s hearing, humans have experimented with measuring exactly how owls can orientate their sound sense. The stiff feathers of the facial disc can move and be directed towards the site of any sound and in total darkness, Barn Owls’ enhanced senses can amplify and precisely locate their prey. Like humans the owl has a pre-aural flap in its ear, the operculum, but owls can swivel theirs at will, unlike us, directing them towards sound. Even more impressive, the Barn Owl’s outer ear cavity reaches from the top of the cranium all the way down to the lower jaw. Inside the cochlea, the hairs that receive sound are longer than in other birds, and are frequently replaced – unlike in humans who consequently go gradually deaf with age. Then there is the owls’ final secret weapon: the ability to hear the higher-frequency sounds made by the movements of small prey better than the lower-pitched sounds of their voices. One set of experiments revealed that the most high-pitched sounds rodents make apart from squeaking are rustling and chewing – the mouse can be innocently nibbling, not uttering a squeak, and still be caught.

  Once detected, this super-sense achieves such precision due to the asymmetrical placing of the ears behind the facial disc. One of the Barn Owl’s ears is larger and orientated downward, and the other smaller and higher on the skull, so sound reaches them at fractionally different moments, enabling the owl to triangulate the sound’s exact position. Scientists have tried blocking one ear and found that the owls – not surprisingly – cannot locate prey in darkness with the use of only one ear. It is not surprising that the owl once developed a reputation for possessing a dark side; its skills must have seemed skin-creepingly powerful. But once where owls and Satan were synonymous now we explore them more sympathetically, with the approach of science, and the ignorance has been replaced by a little more understanding.

  *

  When it takes hold, my curiosity usually gets the better of me. And so after a long, wet winter when the days began to brighten and it felt like the edge of spring once more, I hatched the next stage of my plan. In order to get closer to the object of my fascination, and perhaps be allowed to peer into an owl’s actual ears to see for myself, I took my research to the next level. I volunteered to work at the Barn Owl Trust.

  Luke, the Barn Owl Trust’s new survey officer, was far from irritated by my request to hang out asking bothersome questions in order to find out more about Barn Owl conservation. He was delighted. The reason for the delight was that my timing was perfect. This year happened to be the ten-yearly survey of the Barn Owl population in the south-west, and the Trust needed all the help they could get with the huge volume of conservation work that this required. Apart from enthusiasm, reliability and honesty, you do not need any particular special skills to be a Barn Owl volunteer. So on my very first day, after my briefing we would (I hoped) get our hands on some real live wild Barn Owlets in order to count and measure them.

  The Barn Owl Trust was conceived in the early 1980s when David and Frances Ramsden became concerned that due to changing farming practices there was less food for Barn Owls, and less habitat for wildlife in general. They began by putting up nest boxes and helping farmers to conserve Barn Owl habitat on surrounding land, and by 1988 the Trust was established. Now, the Trust is a fully fledged charity and the main source of Barn Owl information in the UK, all still run by David and Frances Ramsden and their team. The Trust’s work has grown and grown; under its slogan, ‘Conserving the Barn Owl and its Environment’, the aim is to restore the land for wildlife and to protect owls. Their beautiful 26-acre nature reserve has blossomed out of a piece of heavily grazed farmland bought with a legacy donated by a lady called Vivian Lennon. It is now established as the location of one of Britain’s foremost charities working for Barn Owl conservation.

  Counting nesting Barn Owls is a precarious and risky procedure, often up very high ladders, at the tops of creaky old barns and other inaccessible places where the owls choose to nest. Luke needed an equipment holder, a map-reader and most importantly, I think, a ladder ‘footer’. That was me. Luke and I would travel in the Owl Mobile (one of a small fleet of sturdy vehicles specially embossed with the Barn Owl Trust’s logo). Since the nest sites are sensitive to disturbance I signed an agreement to be discreet. I would change the names of the nest sites and not disclose any locations or give away any nesting grid references.

  Kitted out in hiking trousers and the Barn Owl Trust’s logo shirt and fleece, Luke looked as if he would be as at home abseiling down a cliff to find precariously perched nests as repairing a Barn Owl box high in a roof (his previous profession was in building oak-framed houses). Before we left in the four-by-four we had to kit me out too, and Luke found me a logo shirt so that farmers would feel at ease when they saw me approaching. Then we stacked the boot with survey equipment: a large toolbox for fixing broken owl nest boxes, torches, binoculars, boots, waterproofs, gloves, helmets, ladders, climbing harnesses and safety equipment; first-aid kit, collapsible poles on which to fix strange cuboid foam plugs (for blocking up nest holes); packed lunches, flasks of tea and large water bottles, pellet collecting bags, and finally the emergency mobile.

  Finally, Luke showed me how to load and unload the ladders from the roof of the van. I would be lowering them and carrying them about while he spoke to the landowners. A great deal of the Trust’s work is about encouraging farmers and landowners to care for their Barn Owls and how best to protect and conserve their habitat. Some landowners can be very protective, Luke told me; they love their owls and are not always keen to have them bothered by helmeted people wishing to climb up to the peace and privacy of their beams.

  Only five foot two, I clambered up to the roof of the truck for the first time by putting my foot in the wheel arch on top of the back tyre and hefting myself up so that I could reach to fix the ladders to the roof. If I found that my legs were a little short for the scramble it took some effort to stretch my arms and reach the catches that fixed the ladders on to the roof rack, but Luke’s safety check (wobbling the ladders vigorously enough to shift the whole vehicle) left me pleased to see my fixtures did not budge.

  At last we climbed into the van and Luke handed me the OS map we were to use for the day, and the clipboard with the list of Barn Owl sites we would be surveying. Excited about actually finding nesting Barn Owls, I forgot for a crucial period of the drive that I was in charge of the map-reading, so for a while, nobody was navigating. My job was to guide us to the hidden sites, whose coordinates I had to precisely locate. Once Luke reminded me which part of the map we were on, and I finally found it on a fold and managed the coordinates the correct way around, and he explained it all again, we were all set. We left the main road and branched off into deepest Devon, June sunshine pouring down on the bushiest and most flower-filled hedgerows and most sinuous network of lanes imaginable.

  Just as we turned into the lushest jewel of a valley that I had ever seen and the owl-mobile was teetering on the steepest edge, I risked taking my eyes from the map for a moment to peer out.

  ‘Is it this turning, do you think, or the next?’ Luke said patiently.

  ‘This one, this one,’ I hazarded, unable to see round or through a towering thicket of cow parsley and meadowsweet that did not match up in any way with anything I had on my map. I had a fifty-fifty chance of being correct.

  I don’t know how he managed it, but Luke maintained a neutral expression at my slapdash attitude to map-reading. All our time together – and there were many hours and days of it – his professionalism never wavered. We plunged onward into a narrowing drive winding through a forest of ferns, spires of foxgloves, hawthorn, honeysuckle and hazel. I wound my window down: everywhere in the green light the air was vibrating with birdsong: rooks, swifts, thrushes, finches, robins, wrens and warblers. Finally the hedges opened out on to a wide, cobbled yard belonging to a thatched sixteenth-century farmhouse. Scents of hay
floated on the air and I felt as if we had slipped into another dimension.

  We pulled up on the cobbles. ‘I need some food,’ Luke said.

  I looked at my watch. It was 10.15 a.m. He backed the van around and parked up the hill next to a surf of seeding grasses and swifts swooping and skimming down to a reedy valley beyond.

  Luke got his binoculars out in an instinctive gesture that over our next outings became a familiar habit.

  ‘Two o’clock. Buzzard.’

  I got my binoculars out to search where he was pointing.

  ‘No, down there.’

  We watched birds for a few minutes. Luke had now seen my Leica binoculars, the single most expensive item I have ever bought myself. This one brilliant piece of kit has moved me into the silent conversation that happens between all birders about your position on the spectrum of seriousness. It has smoothed situations that I will not go into now, but let’s just say that they are useful in more ways than I expected when I made the purchase.

  Through our lenses we watched a group of four or five swifts dipping and shrieking over the reeds, shooting up into the sky, their flight paths like twizzling streamers.

  Luke put his binoculars down and looked at me with a piercing blue gaze. I attempted to return it with a worthy expression.

  ‘Lunchtime,’ he said, and reached for the packed lunch stowed on the back seat. This, I learned, was almost as serious a part of the day as our research. Luke’s packed lunch was more of a luxury hamper organised by Ratty, the famous picnic aficionado in The Wind in the Willows. First Luke ate a pear, three or four crackers, then an apple and a banana, followed by a flapjack. This was first lunch, so he left the Mars bar and the baguette bursting with salad, chutney and cheese for later.