Owl Sense Read online

  The good news is that many farmers are delighted still to have Barn Owls on their land. Old superstitions in rural areas have long been replaced by increased sympathy, and now the Trust’s special nest boxes are often lovingly watched over by the landowners. If owls come to nest, it can be like a badge of honour.

  After Luke had gone to deepen his specialisms by studying conservation biology at university, I stayed on as a helper. My next Barn Owl man, Tim, was the Barn Owl Trust’s permanent conservation officer. Like Luke, Tim appeared to be tremendously happy for the company, and he was equally tolerant about my map-reading. When we arrived at our first site of the day the farmer stopped work as soon as he spotted the owl-mobile, and quickly came to chat to us. When he saw that we would be ringing the birds, he called his son on his mobile, and soon the whole family arrived on an assortment of quad bikes and on foot, all in their welly boots. They had put up a nest cam and so already knew there were four owlets in this box, and this was their opportunity to see them up close.

  We assembled to watch Tim ascend the ladder, and waited to see the owlets as he lifted them one by one from the nest and gently posted each into a small white cotton pouch to be lowered down to my waiting hands. Each warm, wriggling packet would be examined, then weighed by being inserted upside down in a most undignified way into an owlet-safe transparent plastic tube. Under the watchful eye of the farmer, and his family, each would be quickly measured and ringed so that we could record as much data as possible. The rings mean that we can track the owls, keeping a record of how far they disperse, and where and when they perish – if they are found and handed in, that is.

  After ringing around twenty owlets from four different sites in this way I began to tire of them. Just as I felt I could not go on, Tim suggested stopping for lunch. We found a shady verge, pulled up, opened our packed lunches and got out to listen to the birds. Straight away, Tim identified the various songs:

  ‘Listen to that: a sedge warbler! That’s a whitethroat!’

  Then I noticed something magical. Tim was standing with his head tipped to one side.

  ‘Can you hear that?’

  ‘Which bit?’ I asked, still in awe that he could separate the different voices and identify them.

  ‘It’s a redstart. Look, on that branch there. No – up – top left!’

  We watched the redstart bobbing nervously on its twig, its tail flicking while it called. Tim closed his eyes to listen more intently. ‘That note! When it gets to that note. It rips your heart.’

  That moment I realised with a lump in my throat the great secret of volunteering: it is the giver who gains, and it is a gain through the soul, not the pocket. And with each newly learned birdsong, each gently weighed owlet, the heart grows a little more.

  When we arrived at the final site and I looked wearily at the map, I noticed the name. We were at a spot marked Dead Man’s Bottomcoombe.

  I turned to look at Tim who was twinkling. He saved this one deliberately, barely suppressing a giggle.

  ‘Dead Man’s Bottomcoombe?’

  Ahead was a dell of ferns, ash fronds and hazel trees, and hidden amongst columns of cow parsley and hemlock, the barn was so organic and so pockmarked with insect burrows, birds’ nests and bee holes, it could have sprouted from the underworld. Or an old Devon man’s bottomcoombe.

  The walls appeared to be entirely made out of red Devon mud, and the roof was grown over with ivy. The entrance gaped onto a blackness only an owl could be attracted to. I stood back as Tim entered, and after a moment an adult Barn Owl flew so silently over his head that he was totally unaware of it. I stood watching as it swooped around, looking for a perch. When the owl settled in a nearby tree I followed Tim inside, and another flew over our heads, trying to flee our intrusion. Tim set up the ladder and ascended as the adult owl darted out to join its partner. Immediately we could hear the familiar rattlesnake hissing. Again we had to quickly weigh and ring each one. Astounded by Tim’s continued stamina at this point in the day, I steadied myself and got ready to take each owlet in my hands as it came down. One by one he inserted each into a soft cloth bag and ever-so-gently lowered them down to me. Four this time, and as I stood and waited, a pair of owlet papooses dangling from each hand, staring up at Tim at the top of the ladder, he exclaimed: ‘Aha! I didn’t see you in that corner!’

  He gently lifted out a last reluctant owlet, crooning: ‘Look at you! Look at that tummy! You’ll be too fat to fly.’ Owlet number five was the tubbiest owlet you had ever seen, and weighed in at nearly 400g with Tim admonishing it: ‘You’ll have to go on a diet or you’ll never get going!’

  Tim noted all the details of the final brood along with the little fatty, which I agreed must have consumed an extraordinarily large vole at its last feed. Wing length, body weight, tummy size and ring details all went into the meticulously kept notebook. All of this information was important, all of it needed so we can continue to monitor how the owls are doing. If this work was not carried out we might miss something and the owls could falter without our realising.

  My period volunteering with the Barn Owl Trust was nearly over. It was a kind of time out of time, when you get your heart swelled again and again, as you engage in your favourite pastime with some of the most devoted, knowledgeable, generous and good-humoured people ever. If I could distil the joy of learning it would be that moment, counting owlets and being taken by surprise, again and again, by how inspiring, satisfying and real this work could be. And I learned that we have come a long way: from its earliest inkling as an overgrown hobby in the 1980s, to its fledging in 1988 as a charity, to the present day as the twenty-first-century Barn Owl Trust. Today it not only gathers and collates national data on Barn Owl populations, but also educates and inspires children in schools and trains international groups of experts, consultants and conservationists from all over the world. It strikes me that despite the ups and downs of our shared history, in this particular instance humans might be making some progress. When we get it right, and work with nature rather than against it, we can achieve the most extraordinary things.

  Strix aluco

  TAWNY OWL

  ‘Who’ll dig his grave?’

  ‘I,’ said the owl, ‘with my pick and shovel,

  I’ll dig his grave.’

  ANON., ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’

  At my desk, a message pops into my inbox: ‘Benji collapsed on the bus on the way to college.’

  Imagine you’re on a bus to work: it’s early, and as the bus jiggles along the road you notice a young man – his head is lolling, and he appears to be falling out of his seat. His eyes are closing. You think: he could be drunk, or worse. What do you do? Then the young man begins twitching and slowly collapses off his chair. Each time the bus goes over a bump or rounds a corner, he slips a little further. His legs fold under him, the seat scrapes his back. Most step around him when it’s time to get off at their stop.

  One final passenger is left with Benji on the bus as it reaches the depot. Pushing her buggy and toddler past, she pauses, nervously: ‘Are you OK?’ but he can’t reply. She sees the line of drool, the glazed eyes; confused, she informs the driver, and flees.

  Back from the hospital, Benji is recovered, and remarkably positive.

  ‘The bus driver found me,’ he explains, ‘when we got to the depot. He picked me up and put me back in the seat.’

  Benji is 6 foot tall and weighs around 16 stone. ‘That’s amazing – he must be strong!’

  ‘Yes, he was! He had masses of tattoos, said he’d been in the … what was it … SA …?’

  ‘The SAS.’

  ‘Then, when I couldn’t speak, he called the ambulance.’

  ‘Didn’t anybody else help you before that?’

  ‘One woman asked if I was OK.’

  Benji usually remains conscious during his seizures, so he was aware of everything, but could not speak or control his movements.

  We decide that we should find out who that driver was, and
write and thank him. In that moment our gratitude was beyond measure. Angels look like ordinary people, but just sometimes they appear and catch us when we fall. Perhaps many of us have it in us, that capacity as humans to be at our very best. Empathy becomes compassion becomes kindness. I have seen it again since, a hand held, an arm round a shoulder, something beyond words.

  Benji was tested for epilepsy and also for narcolepsy, and still no cause could be found. In the meantime he couldn’t be prescribed any medication in case it was the wrong one, and we had to wait. But we contacted the bus company online to thank them, and I returned to my owl studies.

  The Tawny Owl is one of the most nocturnal of all owls. With its cryptic brown patterning and silent flight it is rarely seen, and its unsettling cry in the dark must have seemed to our forebears to be the voice of night itself. It still awakens deep-seated ancestral memories. The disembodied shriek, the black eyes that seem to stare into your soul, and the ghoulish swoop, can combine to bring the darkest regions of our imaginative superstition and folklore to life. For a thousand years and more the Tawny’s wavering hoots were portents of death; in Chaucer’s long poem The Parliament of Fowls we are told that amongst all the birds the owl is the one laden with doom: ‘The owle eek, that of deth the bode bringeth.’ The most common and widespread woodland owl in England, the Tawny must be the one Chaucer was thinking of, but to find the roots of these beliefs we can look beyond literature into the earlier evolution of human culture. In the traditional nursery rhyme ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ many birds lament the murder of the robin and plan the funeral ceremony together. Each of the birds is positioned with an anthropomorphic role according to its physical or perceived attributes. It is the owl who has the most lugubrious of jobs:

  ‘Who’ll dig his grave?’

  ‘I,’ said the owl, ‘with my pick and shovel,

  I’ll dig his grave.’

  Human thinking appears to be predisposed, by history, education and culture, to associate this animal with death. But there is also some relish in the shadowy aspects of the twilit owl, and we come back to it time and again, as if there is something about it that is wired into stories that we do not want to forget. Peel back the linguistic layers of the Cock Robin nursery rhyme-cum-murder story, and beyond its medieval resonances of Christian burial ritual it might be riddled with far more ancient beliefs than we might at first notice.

  Among the different theories about the origins of the Cock Robin story is one that stems from the old hero Robin Hood, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. This one suggests that it is a political tale about all of nature turning to stand in support of Robin Hood (represented by Cock Robin).

  But the poem has older resonances even than this, in which the birds of the rhyme have become vessels, metaphors compressing and carrying myth onward, used to tell a story that was convenient to current thought. It has been suggested that embedded in Cock Robin is a story of ancient seasonal rites that celebrate the moment in the Celtic calendar when summer is conquered and replaced by winter. Cock Robin may in fact represent the Celtic sun god Lugh. In the ancient tale of the battles between the seasons, Lugh is seen wielding his lightning spear, fighting for the love of a goddess representing Nature, and is murderously slain by a spear thrown by his shadowy counterpart, the persona of winter. Some mythographers believe that Lugh was commonly known as Coch Rhi Ben and that he would have been involved in rites each year as midsummer came and went, as harvest took place and winter came. Might this name have been anglicised to Cock Robin from its Celtic origin? Other suggested sources are from Nordic culture, whereby Cock Robin is based on the figure of Baldr, again an ancient personification of day or spring, once more brutally murdered. The more we dig, the more it seems as if the same story about a ritual sacrifice or killing of a king figure could have interwoven different tales through time.

  But where does the owl stand amongst all of this? In Cock Robin the owl is the holder of the darkness associated with death and burial. To this day, these repeating associations and stories remain a current that flows through our language. Etymologists suggest that the pronunciation needed in order to rhyme ‘owl’ with ‘shovel’ does point to a very ancient origin, possibly in Middle English. So if the old sonority of the words brings messages from the dim and distant past, today the sound of the Tawny’s hooting call is still used to chill us. In cinema it indicates that evil is afoot. The cliché scare-factor has dwindled perhaps, but some age-old suspicion remains. That eerie sound, coupled with the Exorcist-like head-twist of the real owl, does appear unnatural and can still evoke a certain primeval response. The poor owl suffers from a concoction of all this mythologising, but on some level, humans are longing not only for the spooky mystery of enchantment, but also the reminder of our own mortality.

  Considered to be more ‘musical’ than other owl calls, the male Tawny Owl’s wisp-like, fluting voices are the ones we hear most often. There is a small peak in their calling from August to October when the youngsters disperse from their parents’ territory, and then they become more audible again at the end of the winter, when breeding begins – this is the most night-bound owl, echoing through our dreams and night-time experiences. In the past was this sound perceived to be the voice of the triumphing darkness of winter?

  After the young owls have been driven out by their parents and are forced to assert their own territories in December and between Christmas and New Year, when the weather is still and windless I often rise before dawn to listen to them. I sit in an armchair by the balcony and watch the gradual rise of the winter light through the glass. If it is not windy or wet (Tawnies seem not to bother to hunt in bad conditions as the sound of rain disguises the pattering feet of their prey) I usually hear one. Tawny Owls are territorial and appear to get into breeding mode around January and, if they do not have one already, they will attract mates by calling regularly through the night. In February they are usually all set up with a partner and settling on a nesting spot, normally a sheltered nook high in a mature tree. Sometimes they will take over an old nest; other times they will start to excavate their own nests in a hollow tree.

  In winter, every time a hoot wavers through the mist I stand outside and listen to the strange hoarse note some of them have. Every time, I hope to spot one perched close by on a leafless tree at dawn – when the weak sun comes up you can sometimes see them, feathers ruffled and relaxed, warming themselves beside the trunk or on a south-facing branch. They sit quite still, confident that their mottled camouflage will act as concealment. Usually I only hear them, and rarely do they appear. But one crisp morning, I got very lucky.

  One minute I was sipping my tea by the window. There was nothing but the palest edge of grey light and a wisp of steam from my cup – and then a shadow swooped out of the air. With the lightest of scratches, as if the dawn light was solidifying into life, there it was, perched like an exclamation mark on the balcony: a Tawny Owl, come to my home.

  Its softly feathered feet and black talons were curled on the balustrade as if I had called it in, as if what I had been thinking had just made itself manifest. But there it was, right in front of me, and it turned its head and stared in at me as I stared out at it. It fixed its two dark eyes on mine. Its brown camouflage was exposed against the mist: the rust-tinged facial disc, the tree-bark beige and cream flourishes, the ambrosia-pale, flecked breast, the streaked back and the short, stubby tail. I was transfixed. The symmetry of its face seemed to reclaim all its unnerving, eerie mystery as it rotated and returned repeatedly to pierce me through with those huge eyes.

  A little more steam rose from my morning mug of tea. My mind tumbled down the generations, struck by magical thinking. Thousand-year-old ancestors would have made this moment an omen. But this owl was just an owl, not a sign, and I was just lucky. But still …

  The owl tipped its face downward to eye the twenty-first-century mealworms scattered for the starlings. It looked at me, gazed over the lawn, viewed the unruly hedge. It seem
ed in no hurry to leave. As it paused a while longer I stood up, moved toward it, touched the glass. Could it really see me or was I just another meaningless form? The movement triggered the owl’s reaction. In one fluid movement it opened its wings and tipped off the balcony, drifting away as silent as the wash behind a wave.

  Regaining my composure I ran outside to interrogate the chill air. Where had it come from? Where did it go? Tawnies, I knew, have small territories, but to find out how small, to investigate how close to my house this creature could be living, I first headed for my shelf of books. The Tawny Owl, Wood Owl or Brown Owl as it used to be known, is Britain’s commonest owl and it is the only one that has efficiently adapted to survive in urban areas. With the park nearby, as well as a children’s play area and the closely mown football pitch, the town had a range of habitats interlinked together. The closest was a patchwork of woodland with scrubby areas, many trees, some huge mature oaks – I guessed that’s where it was roosting. There were un-mown grassy banks for voles and mice, bramble patches and hazel trees; a stream and damp, reedy areas, so plenty of hidden, overgrown wild places.

  In the absence of extensive woodland, many places in our towns must in fact be great for Tawnies. If it has been raining, and they have been unable to catch mice, they can wait for earthworms in our lawns, and hunt for frogs and other amphibians around our ponds. And when my friend’s goldfishes kept repeatedly disappearing, and she put up a camera trap, she caught the culprit; no more fish left, but an opportunistic Tawny, cloaked by the night, paddling about, brazenly bathing on camera. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so exuberant if it had known its evening bath was going to be put up on YouTube. Tawnies need to bathe, and are frequently behind whodunnit mysteries in people’s gardens such as opportunistically disappearing pet fish, for which cats normally get the blame. People do not expect owls to come to their gardens, but it’s commoner than you might think. In May 2017, Michael Hilton of Harpur Hill near Buxton reported his most senior goldfish missing. Aptly named Fish, the victim became famous on Michael’s blog ‘Buxton Weather’ – and 2,000 readers were mystified. There had been no storm surge; what had happened to Fish? Could it have been a heron? A fox? An otter, or even a cat?