Owl Sense Read online

  ‘Fish was a seven-year-old goldfish – originally when bought, gold – but had turned pure albino white over the years and grown to around 180 millimetres,’ Michael told me sadly. ‘He was our favourite.’ The CCTV had only been recently installed but it was a good investment. Using the footage Michael was able to identify the perpetrator. At precisely six minutes past midnight the cameras showed a very large bird drop down from its rooftop perch to seize poor Fish who must have been highly visible due to his albinism. In the film, with Fish barely able to struggle in the tight grasp of its razor talons, the Tawny exits the water and pauses on the side of the pool. Evidently the owl was not in the least bit fooled by the life-size plastic decoy badger sitting next to the pond. After a minute to allow its feathers to drip dry and to look around and check the pond for any relatives of Fish, the owl flies off nest-wards with its prize – since it was May, and breeding season, presumably to feed the waiting wife and owlets.

  Where mature trees and hedges are threaded between the houses and roads of our suburban places, conditions are perfect for Tawnies. They can perch and wait for small mammals to rustle past. This is a perch-and-drop hunter, and unlike the buoyant searching glide of the Barn Owl it often sits on a branch and waits for its prey to pass. It drops down, loops low and catches its prey by both sight and sound. At the very last moment, feet extended to strike, it closes its eyes—partly because it is long-sighted and can only see a blur at very close range, but also for protection—it knows exactly where the prey is and with its excellent hearing and eyesight it has already pinpointed its strike with perfection.

  I said to Michael that he might want to think of protecting his pond from now on as Tawnies have small territories, perhaps only a square mile, depending on prey availability. They operate by perfectly memorising their patch, right down to the positioning of individual trees, so that they are less likely to collide with unexpected obstacles in the woods at night. In this way Tawnies can act swiftly and economically and never need to leave their home patch over the course of their entire life. The opportunistic Fish-stealer would probably shortly be back to snatch more juicy fare.

  People used to assume that the huge, deep black eyes of the Tawny Owl could somehow magically see into the dark of night, and consequently pierce into the soul, but of course this is not the case. The owl has special adaptations for its powerful vision – we all know that owls have super-large eyes. To carry their extra weight they have become tubular and fixed, unlike ours which can move around in their sockets. Owls cannot swivel their eyes and so are restricted in their field of vision. This is why the owl needs to be able to rotate its head – so unnervingly flexibly – around 270 degrees. Extra vertebrae and blood vessels enable it to do this without cutting off the blood circulation to its head.

  As the owl’s retina needs some light to be able to transmit information to the optic nerve, so a greatly enlarged cornea and lens allow the maximum amount of light to fall on it. A very high density of rods in the retina make its eyesight extra sensitive, around three to four times more powerful than a human’s in low light, and well-adapted to hunt at dusk and in the broken darkness of a forest. An added adaptation of the eye is that the retina and lens have been brought closer together as the eye evolved, making what the owl sees sharper and brighter in poor illumination. Experiments that were conducted to find how much light owls need to find their prey in dark woodland have shown that the most nocturnal European owls – the Tawny, Ural and Long-eared Owls – can see their prey and approach it directly from 2 metres away in very low light. Other species such as Homo sapiens, and more crepuscular and daylight hunting owls, see nothing in the same level of light. But even the Tawny Owl cannot see in the complete dark and in order to thrive it also needs to rely on its range of other skills such as its hearing and its spatial memory of the particular shape and geography of its patch.

  In towns, where there is usually copious artificial light to help it out, the Tawny can feed on anything small that moves, even the rats, earthworms, lizards and beetles that are attracted to our gardens. In spring, it might take a few small nestling birds or weaker adult passerines as they roost. But despite the close proximity of these owls in our urban areas, like most people I had never seen one in my garden.

  Strix aluco. She had been there, calmly staring at me, right through the glass, right in the eye. At the time I thought: this owl has been here before, many times, and she’s seen into the lit room, and it’s just that I haven’t seen her. And I know it is a she, because in the night she’d intermittently broken our sleep with her screeched ‘kee-wick’s. We often hear the proverbial ‘too-wit, too-woo’ around town at night, but this human expression belies a misconception: it is an amalgam of both the female and the male owl’s call. It is their conversation. The female’s ‘kee-wick’ is piercing but often less robust, less tuneful than the male’s hoot, my book tells me. The male can ‘kee-wick’ too, as an occasional aggressive response to intruders, and confusingly the female can sometimes hoot. This female owl had been calling close to the house, and all the while the soft male hoot could be heard, further away.

  It strikes me that each time one of these rare visitations happens it opens the conversation a little more, embedding these creatures into our consciousness by dispelling myth and enfolding them into familiarity. So when we come across them again we remember they are not just an alien, disembodied voice. Paying attention to them like this might avoid the blandification that happens to so many ‘cute’-faced animals. As we cutify and commodify the natural world they risk becoming ornaments: a static picture on a screen, a shiny cup, egg cosy or tote bag. Once we have encountered one, on the other hand, had contact, been brushed by the downdraft of its swoop or been awoken by that spine-shivering cry, or even attempted to feed or attract one, it becomes more solid, and a subtle but vital part of our being.

  *

  At a farm shop recently I noticed shoppers busily stacking their car boots with 10-kilo tubs of rodenticide. We love to have a cup of tea from those owl mugs you can buy, but at the same time some of us may be unwittingly, unconsciously causing real owls harm. Barn Owls probably suffer the most from ingesting rodenticide poisons because they live so closely beside us and particularly in agricultural areas, but what of the Tawny?

  I contacted the Predatory Bird Monitoring Scheme (PBMS), an umbrella project that encompasses the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology’s contaminant monitoring. It investigates just these sorts of questions and carries out long-term UK-wide testing to determine the current and emerging chemical threats to birds of prey. The PBMS have found that when poison is put out for rodents, it usually takes several days for the toxins to kill them, leaving them vulnerable to being predated while the poison is still active in their bodies. During this period, while the poisons remain concentrated in their livers, the predators that feed upon them are particularly likely to be exposed to toxic effects. The contaminants that pass up the food chain can often be measured in the dead birds that are subsequently found. The PBMS can determine how, and if, the birds have been affected by ingesting the toxins, and the monitoring they undertake can then be used to address conservation issues.

  ‘Predators that feed upon rodents are particularly likely to be exposed to these compounds,’ the PBMS told me, and together with other studies, they have shown that there is widespread exposure, often as an accidental by-product of pest control, and that mortalities can and do occur as a result. The PBMS have monitored anticoagulant rodenticides in raptors such as Barn Owls, kestrels and red kites, as well as Tawny Owls, and have presented long-term trend analysis for Barn Owls and kestrels. As an indicator or ‘sentinel’ species, Barn Owls are still monitored each year.

  Since 2006 more sensitive investigations – using ‘Liquid Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry’ – have resulted in lower concentrations of these compounds being detected than was previously possible. So from 2006, the proportion of birds in which anticoagulant rodenticides have been detect
ed has increased compared to previous years. In 2015 they were detected in 80–90 per cent of Barn Owls and around 68 per cent of kestrels; most of the red kites examined (91 per cent) had detectable liver concentrations. A quarter of the red kites analysed showed signs of haemorrhaging thought possibly to be associated with rodenticide poisoning.

  The poisoning can even persist through the generations. The proportion of owls with detectable Second Generation Anti-coagulant Rodenticide residues – SGARs – was found to be two-fold higher in England than in either Scotland or Wales. SGARs have been increasingly used since the 1970s, as rodents began to develop resistance to products like warfarin. Tawnies are known to have declined in Britain since the 1970s but whether that is directly due to rodenticide is considered less likely than with other raptors. Tawnies’ health would likely be as affected by anticoagulant rodenticides and other poisons put out by humans, but their habitat and foraging are different from Barn Owls’ and they may escape the worst concentrations of poisons. However, one concern is that, because this owl is more common and less cherished than the Barn Owl, less interest may be generated about how the Tawny tribe might be affected.

  It would be a serious mistake to let our guard down – doing this got us into trouble before when the widespread poisoning of top predators like otters and Peregrine falcons went unnoticed until it was almost too late. So the PBMS have carried out a quiet but authoritative study into SGARs in Tawnies. Their work is not always widely known about, but depends on members of the general public donating found carcasses. These projects are vital in monitoring the responsible use of toxins and their presence in the environment and they depend on this citizen science; many people may not think to donate a dead bird, and might merely look at it and walk on. So if you find one, make a note where you found it (it might be useless to science without this information), pick it up, and send it in to DEFRA’s wildlife incident monitoring scheme or the PBMS so they can add it to their collection of data.

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  Strix aluco. I say it out loud, listening to the sonority of the Latin taxonomic name of this bird. Strix. Aluco. It sounds like the duet of calls that the owls make.

  Over two hundred years ago Carl von Linné, or Linnaeus as he is known in his Latinised form, the Swedish naturalist, set about clarifying the categorisation and nomenclature of wildlife by classifying all living things with a system of names. Birds were given names consisting of two Latin words: a noun to classify the genus, or family; and an adjective to describe the species, that was often drawn from the appearance, call or nature of the bird itself. Linnaeus was drawing upon a long history of the coining of phrases and many thousands of years of naming. ‘Strix’ might originate from Aristotle’s ancient description in his pioneering natural history text, the History of Animals from the fourth century BC. His Greek ‘strizo’ means to screech, and was later Latinised as ‘Strix’ by Linnaeus to classify the group of owls that were thought to be a related branch on the evolutionary tree, so the name must originate from the screech sound made by the owls.

  The name ‘screech owl’ should be clarified at this point. Certain owls have always screeched, but neither Tawnies nor any of our European owls are related to the true Screech owls. The Screech Owls are a different family, of the genus Megascops, native to the Americas, and there are 28 species of them. They are all pictured in Heimo Mikkola’s fascinating photographic guide, Owls of the World. The Western screech owl, for example, Megascops kenicottii, lives solely in the Western United States and is found from South Alaska, as far east as Texas, and as far south as Mexico. There are no true Screech owls in Europe. This family of small owls with ear tufts often have light-coloured eyes, ranging from pale yellow to amber although some, such as the Cinnamon screech owl, Megascops petersoni, that lives in Peru, has deep brown eyes. Confusingly, many of the Screech owls do not actually screech but utter staccato notes like ‘bookbookbook’ or ‘bububububub’ sounds; some even emit a high trill or make a sound like a cricket. Confusion has arisen over the name ‘screech owl’ because both the Barn and Tawny do appear to screech, and are sometimes commonly misnamed or locally known as such, but they are not true Screech owls and are taxonomically a different species altogether.

  So perhaps Strix came from ‘screech,’ but there is more to the name than this. Embedded in it is an undercurrent of clues about how our ancestors may have perceived the owl as witch-like. Strix has a resonance that my books do not seem to connect: in Latin striga means witch, in modern Italian una strega. In many cultures the Tawny is named after the eerie sounds of its call at night and these seem in some cases to be distinctly feminine: in Gaelic it is known as cailleach-oidhche, the old woman of the night; in France as le chat huant, the hooting cat, as if shape-shifting was one of its abilities. It seems the name for the sound of the screech, its association with old women and the fearful superstition that owls bring messages of doom, are braided and inseparable: the demonised night-woman or the creature who might know more than we, and the frightening bird that inhabits the dark, all of whose presences are as disturbing and unsettling as magic. In ancient Greek mythology the god of the underworld, Hades himself, was represented by an owl familiar. In yet another battle between the seasons, Hades captured the daughter of Nature, plunging the world into winter as Nature mourned her missing child. The captive daughter Persephone knows that if she tastes any food she will be condemned to a life in the underworld. According to Roman poet Ovid, when Persephone was observed breaking the rules and eating a pomegranate seed, she turned the tale-teller, the orchard-keeper, into an owl as punishment: ‘She threw into his face water from Phlegethon, and lo! a beak and feathers and enormous eyes! Reshaped, he wears great tawny wings, his head swells huge … a loathsome bird, ill omen for mankind, a skulking screech-owl, sorrow’s harbinger. That telltale tongue of his no doubt deserved the punishment.’

  This antique tale is not the only example of shaming a person for transgression by turning them into an owl. In the Mabinogion, an ancient book of tales originating in pre-existing oral storytelling and Welsh mythology, and composed in the Middle Ages, it happens to a famously unfaithful wife. In the fourth branch of the Mabinogi stories the young man Lleu (the Welsh version of Lugh, the Celtic god of summer we met earlier) has been forbidden from ever having a human wife and so one is magically created for him out of the flowers of oak, broom and meadowsweet. Named Blodeuwedd (pronounced ‘Blood-ay-weth’) or ‘flower-face’, she is associated with spring. In some versions of the story wherever she goes a trail of white flowers springs forth. But Blodeuwedd has a mind and life of her own, and she has a love affair with Lleu’s rival Gronw. Together they plot to murder Lleu.

  To compress this magical and complex story, in brief, the two lovers are thwarted when Lleu, having been run through with a spear, comes back to life later as an eagle, and as a punishment Blodeuwedd is transformed into an owl. She is told: ‘You will not dare to show your face ever again in the light of day, and that will be because of enmity between you and all other birds. It will be in their nature to harass you and despise you wherever they find you. And you will not lose your name – that will always be “Blodeuwedd (Flower-face)”’. The story additionally tells us that ‘“Blodeuwedd” means “owl” in the language of today. And it is because of that there is hostility between birds and owls, and the owl is still known as Blodeuwedd.’

  It seems that the medieval Welsh stories met and twined with the Greek and Roman ones. One thing is for sure: the owl’s unsettling appearance and nocturnal aspects passed into myth and our storytelling minds daubed this creature with mistrust, darkness and shame.

  Strix aluco. And what of aluco? The word sounds like a melancholy greeting, a yodel without hope of a reply, like the same hooting calls that I had heard. I search for the etymology, and the books reply that Theodorus Gaza, a Greek who in the Middle Ages translated Aristotle’s work on natural history into Latin, translated Aristotle’s Greek word for the owl, eleos, into Latin as aluco, from
the old Italian word for Tawny Owl, allocco. Aristotle had chosen sensitively: Eleos was not a goddess, or even a minor deity, but something much more insubstantial. She was seen as an entity rather than a person, and she was shy and vulnerable, and chosen as an embodiment of pity, compassion and mercy. People didn’t like to spend time around Eleos, for fear of being infected with misery and sorrows. This sounds about right. At the altar of Eleos, supplicants would honour her by ritual undressing and the cutting of hair. Anyone wishing to be the ally of Athens should make libations to Eleos in this way. Aristotle must have settled upon the name after hearing that supplicating cry clawing its way out of the dark.

  *

  Benji, newly moved into his cabin at the bottom of the garden – to allow him more space and independence – had been party to a whole nightful of owl conversation. Thrilled, he burst in through the front door. ‘Mum! Which owl goes: “Ee-eeeikk! Eee-eeeikk!”? Did you hear it? “Eeeee-iiikkk! Eeeeeeee-ikkk!” All night!’ His face was alive with delight, enthralled at the disturbance caused by the owls.