Owl Sense Read online

  ‘When I used to build houses,’ he said, through a second muesli bar and a slug of tea from his jumbo thermos, ‘we used to eat a lot – you know, you need it, working outside all day, but I still get really hungry and have to eat about every two hours.’

  I stared at my meagre Marmite sandwich, making a mental note to bring something more substantial tomorrow. We sat and looked some more through our binoculars and the conversation turned to his great interest: raptors. We ranged from goshawks and hobbies to the most important of all, peregrine falcons. In between telling me about his study of coastal peregrines and watching another buzzard, Luke started on an orange and then after some thought finished with the Mars bar.

  ‘Peregrines,’ he said, stowing peel and wrappers and cores in the lunch bag, ‘are naturally birds that hunt and nest on the coast and cliffs. This year out of the eight nesting sites I’ve been watching, all but one have failed, which is potentially of serious concern.’ The orange peel had filled the vehicle with its scent. Luke carried on. ‘While peregrines seem to be thriving in some towns and cities, and have a remarkable ability to adapt to urban cliff-scapes such as church towers, and old industrial chimneys, and have a huge following amongst birders, in their natural habitat they are not doing so well. It could be just a bad year, or it could be something more serious, we just don’t know. We need more data.’

  ‘That sounds like what’s happening with urban herring gulls,’ I suggested, and there followed more discussion about the habitat loss of both species, questions arising from species adapting to live in towns and cities, and finally how people see some of these enterprising gull varieties as pests while not always realising that they are in serious decline. With all the shared concerns and interests I was thrilled at having so much to talk about but it was time for the job in hand, which was the Barn Owls down in the valley.

  The land was already baking in the late morning sun, and the potential owls were no doubt cosily shaded and cool inside the dark recesses of their hidden barn. Having made extra sure that we tidied everything away, we checked the map again, drove back into the yard and the owners appeared, right on time for our rendezvous. While I eased the ladders down Luke jumped out to speak to them for a few moments. I found him frowning over the OS map at the route we would have to take through the fields to get to the traditional barn where the pair of Barn Owls was thought to be nesting.

  A minute square on a field boundary, the site was hidden away, three or four fields up a hill and down a valley. ‘That looks like a long way uphill to carry the ladders,’ Luke muttered. ‘Let’s just take one section. I think we can risk it.’

  We put on our helmets, and packed torches, gloves and some tools in case the nest box needed any repairs. We were all set.

  ‘Your helmet is on back to front,’ Luke told me.

  We carried the ladder together, me at the back, sweating but determined to keep up with Luke’s stride. The sun was beating down. It took me a significant amount of trotting to keep up with the muscular pace. As we approached a copse, Luke stopped, put the ladder down and reminded me to be very, very quiet. No chatting from now on.

  ‘The owls will already know we are here,’ he whispered, ‘and they may be extra sensitive if they are on eggs. The owners have told us they regularly see the pair of owls and the last thing we want to do is scare them off if they are nesting. Barn Owls have some of the highest levels of domestic protection and you can be fined for “recklessly” disturbing them whilst nesting,’ Luke explained.

  I deployed my best stealth walk and tried not to breathe, a challenge after all the exercise and the heat.

  We arrived at a jungle of brambles and hawthorn trees. Luke motioned with his hand in a downward movement to be quiet, then made a thumbs-up to signal that we were there. I noticed with admiration that he was not in the least bit sweaty. Beneath the hot helmet my face felt as though it had turned into a tomato.

  The owls had made a good choice of dwelling. From under the rim of my visor, I could see it was fortified by a menacing barricade of stinging nettles. Maybe there were walls and a roof in there, but you couldn’t be sure.

  ‘It’s going to be hard to get in quietly without disturbing them,’ Luke said.

  We put the ladder down and peered into the undergrowth. Every part of me felt as if it had been challenged. This was only our first site visit; ahead was an apparently impenetrable thicket. Were all the sites going to be like this? We still had four more to find after this one.

  ‘I think I can see a way in,’ Luke suggested. ‘You’re smaller than me – can you get in that way? The door should be on the other side if you can get round.’

  I flattened the nettles in my path as silently and softly as I could. After a few moments the walls of the old barn came into focus. The whole structure appeared to have grown up out of Devon mud rather than been built. Its camouflage was something to behold. Mud-made, pockmarked walls sat atop layers of hefty local stone and an ancient oak-beamed doorway. Above was a roof that looked decidedly untrustworthy. I ducked beneath twigs, stepped over branches and unhooked brambles from my legs. Luke followed in my tracks, carrying the ladder easily on his shoulder with his arm threaded nonchalantly between the rungs.

  We stood silently inside, our eyes adjusting, scanning the cool dark. I could not have dreamt a more owlish place. I looked up to the beams and wall edges; this is where the owls would be, if there were any. How would they find their way inside here in the first place? I wondered. I added this to my mental list of notes and questions. Later Luke explained that because Barn Owls evolved to nest in cliffs and trees they are programmed to investigate any dark cavity in their search for safe, dry roosts and nesting places.

  Inside, muffled darkness breathed a sense of something watching us. In the dark, our other senses become more acute, and I could smell something sickly-sweet, as if a feathered presence was secreting itself into the air. Luke gently lowered the ladder down and leant it against the wall. The old barn was silent as a crypt, straw strewn around, a stillness smelling of old sheep wool, hay and manure. I could see why an owl might like it: it was airtight and entirely private. Swallows were flitting in and out of the doorway into what appeared to be absolute darkness. As our eyes adjusted, Luke gestured for us to look up into the eaves and scan the high beams. Quietly we shone our torches around. One beam had telltale splatters of what looked like white paint around it. Owl whitewash! A perch? Luke swished the beam of his torch down over the barn floor. Pellets, hundreds of them! Along with the droppings, this was the source of the smell. It was a regular roost.

  Then something bright in the darkness caught my eye. Standing tall with its eyes clenched tightly shut, perched in the corner, close to the apex of the roof. Our first Barn Owl. And there beside it was the nest box that the Trust had put up two years before. Luke had still not seen the owl, looking instead straight at the nest box with his carpentry eye, judging what part of it might need repairing.

  I moved quietly towards him, touched his shoulder, and pointed. As he turned, something about the bird altered. Was it losing its nerve, getting ready to take flight? We stood immobile and looked up at the shy creature that was now trying to make itself as cryptic and narrow and unobtrusive as it possibly could. All three of us were statues, trying not to draw attention to ourselves, but the elephant in the room was that we, the humans with shiny helmets and torches, were intruding into this shy creature’s sanctuary. Our sudden appearance and sweeping light must have felt to the owl like the most abominable threat.

  I swear the owl was pretending to be asleep, the way a small child might do, but it was obviously not asleep. Its eyes were not perfectly shut; there was a crack of darkness that discreetly watched out from under the pale lashes. Below the box, Luke gestured with a sweep of his torch, lay another mountainous heap of black pellets. My job was to collect some to take back for research.

  As we looked down, suddenly, the Barn Owl took flight. Its silence was absolute. It flew up
and down in the still, cool air of the barn, white against black, uncanny as a negative photograph, elegant, yet vulnerable. Too unsure to fly over our heads and out into the sunshine it fluttered, panicked, this way and that, confused, frightened that it had made itself obvious, still trying to escape. We crouched down so as to be less obtrusive, and straight out it went, gliding on a cushion of warm air over our heads and into the sunlight.

  ‘Damn,’ Luke said. ‘That’s the last thing we wanted to happen.’

  I felt mortified.

  ‘OK, it’s not too bad,’ he reassured. ‘At least it’s sunny and dry. It won’t be in any danger. It’ll find a perch nearby and come back any minute, so we’ll have to be quick.’

  Luke hoisted the ladder up. ‘If it was raining or windy I’d be more worried. Barn Owls are a bit crap in bad weather but it’s fine today.’

  We listened; if there was a hissing noise we would know they were breeding and that there were young in the nest box, but disappointingly, there was no sound. Barn Owlets constantly call for food by hissing in the manner of rattlesnakes, and I wonder if this is a residual evolutionary tactic. When the Barn Owl inhabited warmer places, dry mountains and deserts and such, where there would have been real rattlesnakes, this call could have served as a threatening mimicry to deter owlet-eating predators.

  Luke showed me how to plug the nest box in case there was a female inside. Now I properly understood what the extendable pole and the foam plug were for: if there was a female owl sitting on eggs we would need to stop her fleeing the box and potentially abandoning her eggs, which would defeat the whole point of the exercise. Nervously holding my plug in place I looked on while Luke donned some climbing gear. He fastened on a harness, took a coil of rope and climbed the ladder. This was so high up that my heart was in my mouth. I was footing the ladder and plugging the hole all at once. What if he fell? By the time Luke reached the top of the ladder and hooked the rope onto a beam my neck was hurting from looking up at him. He manoeuvred up to the nest box, and with a slight struggle and the use of a screwdriver managed to open it. I watched, holding my breath as he peered in. Would an owl fly out? What was in there?

  ‘One dead owlet,’ Luke reported. ‘And an addled egg. Hold your nose!’ He cleared the debris, which came raining down around me, fixed the lid back on and, as he came back down, passed a pile of feather and bone on a ledge. A dead adult owl. He brushed it to the ground and we looked at the corpse, its long wings drooping. The legs were surprisingly long, tipped with grasping toes and their prodigious talons evolved for diving into long grass. Everything about the owl’s form was adapted for hunting from the air for small mammals in tall grass. Its rough facial disc was stiffer than I had imagined, as if it had been starched like a choirboy’s collar. I parted the feathers to peer in and find the asymmetrically placed ears. I immediately regretted that. The ears were fathomless, with a bristly-pink, fleshy flap of skin, and frankly not very nice. Why or how this owl died, we couldn’t know, but it would not have been because it couldn’t hear well. ‘It may have starved,’ Luke said. He took the owl. ‘They’re pretty wimpy really,’ he admitted. ‘Not like peregrines.’

  I knew that Luke would be leaving the Trust soon, when his survey was done, to go and pursue his peregrine research. He would be going on to study conservation biology at university, and I would be back working full-time. Before I had time to feel too down about this, he gave me the dead owl to borrow for my research. It lay in my hands, head lolling, perfect wings half-folded as if it had just fallen asleep, its eyes not quite closed. Under the lids I could see shadowy slivers of blackness. The feathered ruff of its facial disc frowning into a tight heart shape as if it was wincing, its body so light it might have died of starvation. Gently we placed it on the scales to weigh and yes, 214 grams, that was far below normal: this was starvation weight. A healthy male might weigh around 330 grams, a female slightly more, even up to 360 grams.

  ‘It’s probably inexperience,’ Luke said. ‘Often, young adults don’t know how to feed themselves properly – maybe it couldn’t hunt effectively enough. Many newly fledged young die because they are not really skilled yet. Look at its middle talon – that’s a clue to the age. If there’s no ridge there –’ he showed, with his index finger carefully uncurling the front middle toe – ‘it shows that it was very young, and still in its first year.’

  Mature adult Barn Owls have a serrated inner edge to their middle talon, probably for grooming, and it was not there in this owl. It could have been from a late brood the previous year, so less than a year old.

  I wondered aloud whether it was male or female. The darker plumage, the speckles on the breast, the dark bars on the primaries and tail feathers and the golden brown feathers around the throat all suggested, Luke said, that it might be a young female, but we couldn’t be sure. I wrapped my unhappy gift carefully in a bag to take home.

  Back with the family, I showed my find. Jenny spent some time gazing at its face. She held it in both hands and examined the wings closely, opening them by the window so that light shone through them. This way, they looked like angel wings.

  We stored the owl in the freezer. Later I found Jenny had labelled the freezer drawers with handwritten warnings sellotaped to the drawers about the less-than-savoury contents: ‘Food’, ‘Food’, ‘Food’; ‘Dead Owl etc.’ My specimen collection went unappreciated by Rick, whose stash of curries and other delicacies now had to be eaten up, or stowed elsewhere.

  ‘Can we have this drawer back yet? There isn’t enough room,’ Rick suggested after a period of strained patience.

  ‘Will you have it stuffed?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘You could boil it and get the skeleton,’ Benji said.

  I didn’t want to do any of this, so there it remained, encased in its cold mausoleum, until one day I couldn’t stand it any more and decided to get it out.

  I placed the owl on the table to thaw, and when it was ready I began to examine it. When fully flexed, the wingspan measured just over 107 centimetres. There were ten primary flight feathers and on the upper side they were clearly barred with chocolate brown against a buff background; on the leading edge they were golden brown and the soft, tapering trailing edges faded into a creamy-white softness. Underneath, they were paler. This must have been to conceal their silhouette against the sky, so that any prey would be less likely to see them coming. On the first primaries, a stiff comb-like fringe lined the leading edge of each feather. This is what breaks up the air and dissipates the sound of the Barn Owl’s flight so effectively. Of all the owls the Barn Owl is the most silent, and looking closely I could see how.

  With a hand lens I examined the rest of the primaries and began to see the pattern and order within. All the flight feathers had a subtle velvety fringe on the windward side, the leeward vane trailing into nothing, so soft I couldn’t tell by touching where the feather surface ended and the air began. Wind farm manufacturers and aeronautical engineers covet the silence of the owl’s flight, attempting to mimic the design and maximise stealth in fighter jet wings and wind turbine blades.

  Each feather became more fascinating the closer I looked. The keratin shaft is like a trunk where tines – or to use the correct term ‘barbs’ – of feather fork away into little branchlets, a forest of barbules, wind silencers meshed together by tiny hooklets of astounding regularity. This complex arrangement is strong but light enough to create an aviation tool that manipulates air currents with absolute perfection. Now the wings became things of wonder in my hands. From this perspective, still attached to the owl’s lighter-than-light body, they seemed as wind-honed as larger formations across the earth. I felt a sense of vertigo as they conjured images of other wind-formed shapes across the planet. The dunes of Namibia, the blasted rock sculptures of the desert in Arizona; wind-blown curves and feathered crests of snow atop Alpine mountain ranges.

  I took a sharpened pencil and selected a sheet of thick paper of the sort that seemed worthy. The graphite was just ri
ght for the ashen cobweb of silver that shawled the wheat-colour of the owl’s back and head. On its breast, a few irregular graphite flecks suggested again that it might be a female, as males often (but not always) have a pure white front. The legs were startlingly long and lanky, designed for making a strike for prey in tall grass. The talons had a mean, tapering sharpness that suggested serious business. This may be a light bird but its violence and power are hefty. As I drew, the owl began to fasten itself in my mind. Why is it that humans are constantly trying to create representations of things beyond our own experience? We try to possess them in some way. But these creatures can never be truly possessed by anything other than the wind and the grass.

  Again, the graphite made for a good talon-grey, even though I am not very skilled at drawing. The dark rotation of the pencil, in the simple act of contact with paper, with a fleck of white for a curve of light, did a fair job. There is a kind of intention in drawing, and I was seeing things that I would never have noticed or understood without this close-looking, without this lens that focused my attention. The white petals of the eyelids, with their slivers of black pressed just beneath; the pale skin of the cere – the skin around the top of the beak – fading into the nostrils; and a hooked bill that was both raptorish and human-like. The soft golden bib cupped the face, the wings slipped open and closed like the bloom of a windflower.

  *

  Since the Second World War much of British farmland has changed, in some places almost beyond recognition. It is thought that the loss of old pastures and rough grasslands due to more intensive agriculture might have caused a decline of 70 per cent in the Barn Owl population. With the proliferation of dual carriageways the low-flying Barn Owls have been victims again; they do not have the resources to avoid fast cars. Finally, the increased use of rodenticide may be the final straw for some owls. Eating poisoned rodents can build up toxins in a bird’s system, weakening and possibly eventually killing it. We cannot know how it feels to regularly ingest such poisons, or what the effects are, but nausea, weakness, lack of appetite, coordination problems and decreased resistance to disease may result. Nearly 90 per cent of Barn Owls found dead and subsequently tested have very high levels of rat poison in them. Is it the poison that kills them? We don’t know for sure, but its build-up in their frail bodies is likely to weaken them.