Owl Sense Page 8

  ‘I know! It was a Tawny. I just saw it on the balcony!’

  ‘Wow.’

  We moved about the house infected with owlishness. When I sat down to read a little more Benji put his head around the door: ‘Eee-ikk! Eeee-iikkk!’ and I hooted back: ‘Hu-hooooo!’

  Benji’s condition had stabilised a little, but for the family our veneer of confidence had been worn thin. When he was aged nine, we realised we’d been noticing years of bizarre and puzzling responses that suggested he might be wired differently from other people. We became suspicious that he might have Asperger syndrome. Fears and phobias, anxiety about family gatherings, meltdowns at parties and other noisy social situations had long made us think that Benji was autistic. The very worst had been a memorably unpleasant school disco where after some searching he was discovered curled foetal under a table. Being very literal, and often having countless other misunderstandings at school, he had eventually been diagnosed, and we finally knew for certain that our highly sensitive, intelligent boy had high functioning ASD, or autistic spectrum disorder. Once, we took him to the optometrist, thinking his trouble with writing might be eyesight-related. His eyesight was fine, but the optometrist contacted me by phone later. He had something on his mind. ‘Have you thought that your son might have Asperger syndrome?’ he helpfully asked. We had considered it, but Benji’s condition was complex and presented him with many challenges. Highly sensitive and meticulous, on the outside he appeared entirely normal, and highly articulate, but this masked the fact that on the inside he lived in a world that was often baffling and overwhelming to him. This new response, this entire body shut-down, was the most puzzling of all. We had steered as stable and gentle a course through the years as we could, taking him out of mainstream education and sending him to a small, sympathetic school. But now I wondered whether nevertheless the strain of his education and many years of disorientating social interaction in a confusing, frightening world might be some of the factors affecting his seizure condition.

  When one of our loved ones is threatened, it is at these times that many of us search for help and guidance. Beyond the experts, who admitted that much of the human brain remains mysterious, and who did not appear to be able to provide many answers, perhaps encountering the owl could not have been more propitious. Benji was thrilled with it. It brought him alive. Any sign like this would be gratefully received, even if it came in the form of an owl. Especially (since that was my research) if it came in the form of an owl. We wondered how we could tempt the owl back to our garden.

  Then I remembered my friend Stephen.

  ‘You’d be welcome to come and spend the evening looking at the wild Tawny Owl I’ve been training,’ he had warmly said once, a year or so before. ‘It’s a male that is habituated to me. He comes to my bird table – I’ve trained him so that he flies in when I whistle. I feed him. I’ll send you some pictures.’

  The images had swooped into my inbox the next day: tantalising shots of a handsome, obsidian-eyed, amber-and-rust-coloured raptor with flecked cream-and-chocolate plumage and hefty talons. He was perched on a bird table close beside Stephen’s converted barn, his black-pebble eyes staring directly into the camera lens in the unsettling way that only an owl can. I had some burning questions. Could we try to feed our owl, to attract it back to the balcony? On the phone, Stephen suggested chopping up some day-old chicks bought from a pet centre, so I nipped out to get some. The young assistant showed me to the freezer where the unsavoury items were kept.

  ‘They’re mainly used for snake food,’ she told me. I took five to begin with, worrying about how my family would react to the new menu. Just as she closed the freezer, a medium-sized rodent plopped onto the floor with a small thud.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘A guinea pig.’ I used to keep pet guinea pigs and in this moment my resolve began to wobble. The shop assistant stuffed the unfortunate animal back amongst the heap of corpses and led me to the till to pay for my horde.

  Having had no luck with my Tawny feeding experiment, I called Stephen. There was a biting east wind but he was out monitoring. By this time Tawny and his mate were in high courting season, performing love duets each night. During courtship, from late winter and into February, the male Tawny will come to perch near the female and puff out his plumage, giving him an even more dumpy appearance than usual. He might sway from side to side, then up and down, and perhaps lift one wing and then the other. If this is not enough to tantalise the female, he might grunt softly, plumage tightly compressed, and even slide one foot towards her and back in a flirtatious game of owl-footsie. He might pursue her with screeches and groans. Where all this might not always be a successful strategy between humans it can work with lady owls, and if she is charmed, the female will let the male know by fluffing and quivering her feathers.

  I could hardly contain my excitement at the pictures Stephen sent me of the owls together. They were investigating the nest box he had put up; the pair were caught snooping about it, and then each owl went inside.

  In April a new missive came: the female was inside the nest box more often than out. Was she sitting on eggs? At intervals of forty-eight hours, Tawnies can lay anywhere between one to six pure white, round eggs and the female incubates them alone for twenty-eight or twenty-nine days.

  Stephen’s Mrs Tawny came out less and less frequently. When she left, it was very brief, as Stephen put it: just for ‘a pellet, a pee and a poo’. Between her economical exits, the male devotedly uttered a beautiful trilling warble, a kind of soft cradle song, as if promising to be there always and to bring her food. From now on she would be highly dependent on his provision for the successful incubation and rearing of their chicks. I wanted to witness this but could not get away, trapped at my desk marking my students’ essays. For some reason, when I thought of the owls and their sweet domesticity, I was reminded poignantly of my husband Rick bringing me cups of tea in the early days after childbirth while I nursed my own young. It was a vulnerable, totally dependent and rather desperate feeling, and the small acts of sustenance, the flying in with deliveries of vital food and drink, were heartful and encouraging in those helpless first few days and weeks of child-rearing. Now, taken up with teaching and nurturing my students, and looking after Benji, it still felt as if, owl-like and brooding, I needed that tea. So often too busy to stand and stare, so taken up with the humdrum, we need to escape the nest box for a while and get some fresh air. Mental health experts corroborate it: we need trees and grass and birds to keep us sane. But it isn’t just that we need the grass and the crows and the wind in the trees, it is that we need that emotional identification with the wild. And the wild needs us to feel that compassion – it goes both ways. We will not fight to preserve what we do not love. And to keep our love alive, we need contact.

  With perfect timing, Stephen reported hatching. He had been monitoring closely, and with the emergence of the female he could tell the young were food-begging. With increasingly tempting daily email updates entitled enticingly: ‘The unbelievable truth!!!!’ and ‘You have to see this!!!!!!!’ I couldn’t stand it any more. As work was at last easing up I grabbed the phone and finally spoke to Stephen, made a plan with him, then bundled myself into a coat, chucked my wellies and my notebook into my car and flew into the greenest of green folds of deep mid-Devon, my worry lines lifting as I went: finally, I could stand amongst the trees.

  *

  With my back to an oak tree, eyes closed, breathing the moist air of the woods, the rough, cool presence of the earth seeped into me. Evening scents of mulch and moss fill my nose. Ankle deep in the heady tang of wild garlic, I felt my stomach begin to let go of all the knots of stress.

  ‘He’ll be here in a few minutes, definitely by nine,’ Stephen promised. Ahead of me and all around was a small mixed woodland covering the steep rolling hillsides of rural Devon. Dumnonii, that’s what the invading Romans called the tribes of Devon: deep valley dwellers. The name is just about spot on. The people here can be rightly
proud of their deep and hidden valleys. And this particular ‘nether cleave’ had a bigger draw than most.

  ‘Just keep whistling,’ Stephen instructed with confidence. ‘He’ll be here. I’m going to finish cooking supper.’ He disappeared back down to the house leaving me alone with the tree, and the echoing soundtrack of birds: thrushes, blackbirds, and a raspy sky full of rooks, crows and jackdaws. I stole a glance upward, though only for a second. I knew he’d arrive silently, and I could blink and miss him in the fading light.

  Through the new leaves of the treetops to my right, rising in the deepening blue, the moon was already up. I hardly dared look: when he came there would be no warning. To my left, over the downward curve of the meadow, a bat had begun its flitting evening’s hunt. I whistled again, trying to sound like Stephen, but knew that to the expert ear of the one I was summoning, it must have sounded woefully inadequate. You can’t normally simply whistle and summon a wild owl, but somehow, with the reward of raw chicks, and a great deal of patience and repetition, Stephen had trained this Tawny Owl.

  Then, low over the foliage, he came. A swooping shadow against many shadows. So low he looked unearthly, running suspended on a loop of air as if there was a cushion between his wings and the ground. His wings splayed, soundless from the velvety fringes on his primary feathers. The silent arrival must have freaked out our ancestors. The wings of all the other birds make a noise when they fly. Why not with this one? And as the Tawny Owl silently hunts all the other birds go mad with alarm. What could be more eerie?

  As Tawny reached the perch he landed with only the slightest scratch of talons. I thought I could hear the sound as he gripped the perch and folded his wings, but I could not be sure. He stood and stared back at me. That stare. I was transfixed: shorter by far and different in silhouette than Stephen’s tall, wiry contours, I melded myself into the tree, trying to be bark-like, rooted. The Tawny was perched beside the bait but he didn’t take it yet. Distracted, listening, his head turned this way and that, and then back to me. He fixed me with a stare, suspicious, and now I was sure that he recognised I was not the normal shape who nightly laid offerings on this table.

  He was so alert, and yet aloof, twitching his face around and around, this way and that, to capture every sound the forest had to whisper. His eyes spookily appeared and disappeared as his head rotated a spine-tingling 270 degrees. I had time to see Tawny’s individual markings: his softly flecked front and dark bib of rust-red plumage just beneath the facial disc. Then he picked up the diced bait and flicked his head up, eyes closed, and swallowed it down whole. Then the next morsel; swallow; then the next. He glanced at me, watching, between each beakful and the next. One more fleeting glance and he was off, as silent as he came. I stood for a few seconds, adrenaline fizzing through my limbs.

  Back through the gathering dusk, my wellies clumping happily over the hill, through the gate, through a lit window, back to the human world, I got an owl’s-eye view. There was Stephen, putting the finishing touches to dinner: I could smell good things to eat, but the evening was far from over.

  Stephen had put camera traps around the nest box when he realised the owl might bring a mate here. In the last few weeks, the footage had confirmed successful breeding and Tawny regularly bringing food. I could hear her calling now, from the screens in the living room. But as we sat down at the little table to eat, there was more to come. In unobtrusive but perfect spots along the nearby stream, Stephen had put more camera traps to track another animal’s progress. We sat at a small table in front of a row of five screens, showing an angle on the nest box, and also on parts of the stream: a bend, a rock, the bank, some roots. With much devotion and close observation, and the help of the surveillance, Stephen had worked out many of these creatures’ habits.

  Before we could have any more encounters, however, we had to eat. Stephen placed a plate of delicious food and some garlic bread in front of me but I could hardly look at it. This was the most exciting TV dinner I had ever had.

  ‘Don’t take your eyes off the live screen,’ Stephen instructed through a mouthful of home-made curry. ‘When she comes we’ll have to stop eating and there will only be a few minutes to get down there.’

  My stomach was in knots. When she comes? She’ll definitely be here?

  ‘In a few minutes.’ This is what he had said about the owl so I quickly managed my mouthfuls by feeling the food onto my fork and trying not to blink or take my eyes away from the screen. The food was delicious, I’m sure, if I could have tasted it.

  The river’s inhabitant was an old friend of mine: an otter.

  I had spent four years tracking otters across the British Isles on my previous quest, and the thought of being reacquainted with another was tantalising. Stephen was out of the room fetching more garlic bread when it happened: a slim form appeared furtively around a bend in the river. ‘There she is, there she is!’ I shrieked, spraying my mouthful of biryani in all directions. The otter’s watery back appeared and then disappeared; she floated as if inflated with air, her face dipping beneath the surface, her tail a slip hardly breaking the flow of the stream.

  Stephen pushed a head torch into my hands and knocking our poppadoms flying we ran down to a low bridge at the stream near the house.

  Then, we waited.

  ‘Are you going to be able to get up quickly from that position?’ Stephen asked critically, eyeing my comfortable otter-watching lotus position.

  ‘I’ll need to get up?’

  ‘Yes, we can follow her when she passes through. If you want.’

  After a few minutes, two eyes appeared on the water’s surface, lit up by the beams of our head torches.

  ‘Won’t our lights disturb her?’ I whispered when she dipped under the water.

  Quietly untangling my legs I crept to the other side of the bridge. The otter’s ears disappeared beneath the surface and she came up again, apparently quite used to the light. She was far too busy with the job of catching trout to take any notice of us. She had cubs to feed. (Stephen had noted when the dog otter visited her, when she disappeared to give birth, and that when she reappeared she was fishing much more urgently.) Just once, I noticed her lift her nose and test the scent on the air: something was different; did she sense that a new person was here? She threw us passing glances, but then she was back in the stream, herding terrified trout into the shallows. One shot out of the water in fear and beached itself on the pebbles. Instantly she was on it, champing it up head first – how could it be possible to eat up all those spiny bones, flesh and fins so fast? – less than a minute and there was not a silvery scale left of it. And back she slid again, into the flow without so much as a wipe of the whiskers.

  I dangled my face over the edge of the bridge. At this proximity, through the ripples I could see her water-smoothed pelt, her back legs working hard, her whiskers sweeping the pool. A 10-inch trout was holding still, petrified, in the shallows. She shot past him, her flattened corneas scanning, her ears folded into small triangles. She passed within a few centimetres of the trout’s immobile body, sweeping her snout this way and that, but she couldn’t see him in the dark, stirred-up water.

  The trout shot under the bank, under our noses, and she powered after it, furiously ruckling everything to chase him out. Reeds and water dropwort flew in all directions, she surfaced, clearly almost out of breath with the effort, seized a mouthful of air and was gone again, water roiling in wrinkles off her sinuous spine. I’d never seen so much strength and determination to kill; a blur beyond wolves and elk, beyond cheetah and gazelle, this was water turned into a frenzied muscle, into supple, gymnastic knots of water; water and otter and fleeting fish in a whirling vortex.

  We followed Hammer Scar – named so because of the shape of the healed flesh wound on the tip of her nose – for a while longer. Otters often get scars on their snouts from fighting, and male otters can grab females by the nose to subdue them, so the scar may have been inflicted by her mate. Once she came out of the di
tch and ran over my feet, glancing up at me, surprised but not alarmed. What amazed me is that we were able to witness this incredible night-time ritual, this dance of life and death in the tiniest and most unobtrusive of streams, because Stephen knew (almost) her every move, from the time she came out to her exact route to the time she went home to rest.

  But not quite her every move: perhaps we had not been expecting the moment she leapt onto the pinnacle of a mossy tree stump and sprainted there, looking back through the beams of our head torches as if to say: Ha! You didn’t know I could do that. (Stephen knew, of course, but I was enthralled.)

  We trudged back, out of breath and imbued with otter.

  Eventually I slid back out into the night for the hour-long journey home. The sky was full of stars. ‘Here –’ Stephen pressed a cassette into my hand. ‘Listen to this on the drive.’ I floated through the miles of Devon with an old BBC recording from 1984, Year of the Owl narrated by Andrew Sachs. I drove through owl-scapes that filled the dark inside the car.

  Back home, I slipped into the bedroom. The radio clock said half past one. I felt my way under the duvet and wondered how I could wrench any of it into words? Even so, some made it, articulating something Tawny, I hope, from somewhere out there in the deeper dark.

  *

  Regular news bulletins came from Stephen. Apart from the fact that I forgot my wellies by the back door of his porch, Tawny’s young could still be heard. Soon, they would appear. Stephen said we’d avoid the nest at this point: Tawnies can become very protective of their young and will not hesitate to strike if they feel threatened. Wildlife photographer Eric Hosking famously lost an eye when he got too close trying to get a good shot, and he told of it in his book An Eye for a Bird.