Owl Sense Read online

  When would the young owlets fledge? At night, when Stephen went to feed Tawny, some of the bait was taken into the nest box. I would have so loved to know what was going on in the dark privacy of that nest. Then, to my joy, Stephen generously offered that I could house-sit while he made a trip to Northumberland to watch seabirds. Full of impatience, I spent days flitting in and out of a fantasy in which one of the owlets fell down and I would have to rescue it. I decided that when I was there I would spend as much time as possible in the woods, just in case a plummeting owlet needed putting back. As Tawny babies become more exploratory they frequently take a tumble, but they are such good climbers that they can often get back to safety. If you find one on the ground, it is usually best to leave it, especially as the watching parents know exactly where they are due to the constant calling. Even if you simply attempt to place it back on a branch out of harm’s way, an angry parent owl would whomp you if they saw you approach or touch their young. And without a motorbike helmet to protect against those talons you’d risk certain blood loss.

  Young Tawny Owls will normally fledge twenty-eight to thirty-seven days after hatching, and the ping of a new email shattered my owl-rescuing dreams: from Stephen, entitled ‘And you’re not going to believe this’ with eight exclamation marks. Hands sweating, I opened the mail. Filling the screen was a picture of the owlets taking flight! I’d missed it! A short film showed one, two and three, as they sprang from the box and flew gracefully away. My delusion came crashing down. The owlets had fledged. I would not be an owl mummy, even for a moment.

  ‘They haven’t gone that far,’ Stephen assured me. ‘You’ll be able to find them in the trees. They can move some distance from the nest, but you’ll still be able to hear them.’ Tawny young remain ‘branching’, perched in trees on the nest territory, for several weeks, venturing further and further as they practise their flying skills. Jenny and I packed the car with wild camping equipment. As well as looking after Stephen’s house, we would sleep out beneath the trees where there would be hooting owlets. We could listen for them, and should see them, no problem, Stephen reassured me. Their patch in the wood was small and according to him they would be noisy enough to locate with ease. Jenny would revise for her GCSEs while I worked, and in between we would observe the wildlife, feed Tawny each night and experience the excitement of the evening fly by.

  At two minutes to ten, from her surveillance position at the five screens, Jenny cried out: Hammer Scar had appeared on screen two and we piled into Stephen’s four-by-four and hurtled down to the river. This time, she brought a cub with her, and we spent nearly an hour with the pair as mother fished and uttered whickering, whining cries as she summoned the cub to come to eat. They seemed so habituated to the light from our head torches that they repeatedly ran and swam through the shallows very close to our feet, and at one moment Hammer Scar swam on her back looking up at me, whistling all the while to her cub.

  The next day, Stephen disappeared early to go on his birdwatching trip. His elusive and aptly named collie, Badger, who we were also looking after, lay at the far end of the living room, eyeing us suspiciously. ‘He’s just socially awkward, Mum,’ Jenny explained as I attempted to buy his friendship with a cocktail sausage. ‘Just give him time.’ Later, whilst reading a book on the sofa, one hand trailing toward the carpet, I felt a snout lifting my arm just below the elbow. Badger was sitting beside me, a shy grin on his face, as if we were the oldest and best of friends, and he had only been pretending to be stand-offish for his own reasons. He even allowed me to remove a tick that I discovered whilst tousling his ears. I placed it dutifully in Stephen’s tick container on the kitchen dresser.

  A vet in his day job, Stephen had told me that the largest amount of cash he had ever been paid for his photographic work was for a macro close-up of a tick for a pharmaceutical company. Now he was following that up with a little research for the same firm. In a live experiment, he was breeding some ticks in an attempt to get a picture of the eggs hatching. An old ice-cream tub with some turf was crawling with six or eight of them, each at varying points in their life cycle. I was now used to the tick tub, but when Rick arrived on a visit it was another matter. ‘That is making me feel sick,’ Rick said, over dinner, wondering what might be lurking in the grass. I shifted the tub and its experimental community to a more discreet spot, making sure to water the grass and checking none of the ticks could escape.

  *

  Finding fledged Tawny Owlets from below can be a challenge. Often hidden amongst spring and early summer foliage, perched high up amongst branches, they are watching us long before we see them. In the evening they emerge more conspicuously to call for food. There is only one sure way of finding them. By fixing ourselves to the spot, listening hard, and becoming as invisible as the owls themselves. You must stay still, and wait, quiet as ivy, and listen. The waiting can be a long process, but stillness and patience are the needle and thread that stitch us into nature.

  Young Tawny Owls have different phases of dispersal after the initial departure from the nest. First they find a perch nearby on which to ‘branch’, simply to practise their moves, trying out new balancing and perching skills. At this point they do not venture far from the breeding site as they are still totally dependent on their parents for food. In Stephen’s woods, amongst the hum and clatter of many other bird sounds, of wind and rain and leaf-rattle, the Tawny parents had guided the newly fledged juveniles to a suitable perch near the nest. From there the still-downy young were exploring, gangly-grey and unsure, never going far, and they called, during the evening and at night, to remind the food-providing parents (and us) of their locations. If they fell, they could easily get back to a safe branch by hooking into any available toe-holds of ivy, branches and bark with their superbly adapted needle-sharp talons.

  The young’s call is the giveaway. Sharp as a startled blackbird, high-pitched, elongated cheeps, and if you listen hard, soon they become recognisable and predictably repetitive. The juvenile Tawnies will stay in the vicinity where they hatched and remain dependent on their parents until the early autumn, by which time they are good flyers, and tuning up to be adults. Now they are more thoroughly independent the parents may assist their move out of the territory amid much hooting and screeching. At this time of the year, there is a nightly cacophony as adult Tawny Owls defend their territory from incoming youngsters trying to establish a new patch for themselves, and there will be a great deal of noise from dusk until late into the night as adults call out to repel the newcomers. Depending on the habitat and abundance of prey a Tawny’s territory may be quite limited. Ringing research shows that the average distance travelled by adult Tawny Owls from where they hatched may only be between 1 and 4 kilometres. Where we live in the south the average dispersal is 1 to 2 kilometres whereas in the north it is 4 to 5 kilometres. This may be due to climate, habitat and/or density of prey species, but in any case, they are home-birds. Stephen’s Tawny may never venture more than 1, 2 or 3 kilometres in any direction. Which may be why he can hear the whistle, and always responds with a fly-by each time Stephen puts out food beside the feeding station.

  In June and July, Jenny became my owl-tracking partner. Her GCSEs were over and she was stress-free, about to enter the new world of the sixth form, and as yet still eager to accompany me. In between organising important social events with her equally footloose friends Erin, Hazel and Kit, she came with me. Why don’t you bring them too? I ventured naively. ‘Mum,’ came the exasperated reply, ‘my friends don’t go outside.’

  So much of mothering, I was beginning to see, is about learning to keep quiet. Jenny was more protective of her privacy these days, and only sometimes linked arms with me when we were out in the woods together. But among the trees with the moss softening our footfall, the fluttering green light and the potential sighting of owls, all that mother–daughter tension vanished. Sometimes, if the path was wide enough, I found her holding my hand as we walked along. I gained a glimpse of how ou
r relationship was, and how it might be in years to come, when we would be free of the pitfalls and torments that are the minefield of mothering and adolescence.

  ‘Listen!’ we both said at once. ‘A young Tawny!’

  The high-pitched begging call sounded a little raspy, like a knife being sharpened on a whetstone. ‘Ke-suipp, ke-suipp,’ it repeated. We gazed up into the branches listening to the hoarse call and return of the young bird as it summoned its parents. Young Tawnies are well hidden to ground-dwelling human eyes. Their cryptic still-downy plumage keeps them safe from prying eyes, but their inexpert, persistent vocalisations give them away. Even then, the cries are piercing but hard for our mere human ears to triangulate, as an owl would, to locate its young. Another raptor, however, may find the repeating sound of the calls easily, and young owls do get caught in this way; buzzards, goshawks, sparrowhawks and other owls in the vicinity could potentially overlap with them in the evening and have a go at making a meal of them.

  Tangled in the undergrowth of old bluebells and wild garlic were the eaten remains of a dismembered woodpecker, recognisable only from one foot, the distinctively sharp bill and the scalped skull where an edge of scarlet plumage still remained clinging along the forehead like a blood-red eyebrow. I removed the skull and popped it in a hanky to take home, some of the neck vertebrae still attached, planning to add it to my growing specimen collection.

  ‘Mum, look!’

  Jenny pointed at a shape flowing through the trees: the young Tawny had taken to the wing and was swooping low. Perhaps this was the only way we would see it, if it moved like this. We watched it settle into a new tree and soon it had blended in, but as we moved away, its face turned like a radar as if unable to tear its gaze away from us.

  *

  Back on our home patch Rick watched me as I bent down and carefully lifted a small, feathered corpse from beneath a tree. I’d enticed him to accompany me on my favourite woodland walk, only to make a new find.

  ‘Please. Not another one.’

  Our autumn walk on the edge of the moor had already taken a grisly turn. For me, it was gold-dust. This Tawny was lying inert beneath a hawthorn beside a little Methodist chapel. It must have just dropped dead and fallen off its perch in the night. The corpse of familiar russet feathers was beautiful and intact.

  ‘Do we have to take it?’

  I examined the wings, the rust-striped primary feathers with their fine velvet fringes and softer-than-thistledown trailing edges. This was research. I must have it. I stared at the supersoft comb-like edges, called ‘fimbriate’ meaning fringe-like. These flutings or fimbriae act to silence flight by breaking down air turbulence as it flows over the wing, avoiding the gushing noise most birds create when they fly. The fluted, comb-like edges create ‘micro-turbulences’ instead, and these effectively muffle the sound of the owl’s flight.

  Having checked for maggots and blood, or anything else unexpectedly leaky, I placed the freshly dead owl on the dog blanket on the back seat of the car. In my reading I’d discovered that there are two types of Tawny Owl, each with different colour ‘phases’. In the north of Britain, rather than being a warm russet colour, the Tawny often has greyish plumage: this is the grey ‘phase’. The name is confusing because it sounds as if the owl has phases and will change its colour, but this is not the case. Although Tawny plumage can vary, individual owls never change their colour. As Britain was separated from the rest of the European land mass around 8,000 to 8,500 years ago, it is possible that with our geographical isolation two distinct species have developed: Strix aluco aluco, and Strix aluco sylvatica. While the first species can be found further north in Britain, the southern russet-feathered Tawnies are probably from the latter subspecies, and as their name suggests, inhabit primarily woodlands. Much research and copious museum collections of their skins bear this out: there could be two types of Tawny Owl! My Tawny is probably a sylvatica, judging by its plumage, but I expect it is all subject to debate, as owl research still has some way to go.

  ‘What’ll you do with it this time?’ Rick asked.

  Back home, the Tawny went into my frozen mortuary before we sent it off anywhere – by this point we had bought a special freezer just for my specimens that now contained:

  One dead chiffchaff (window strike)

  One dead Barn Owl (found at a Barn Owl site)

  One juvenile rat (brought in by cat, uneaten)

  One field vole (roadkill)

  One shrew (cat again)

  Six day-old chicks (bought from pet shop as Tawny fodder)

  One woodpecker (parts, found half-eaten in woods)

  Our friend Hannah eventually solved the conundrum of the growing collection of dead things. She bumped in through the door with a muscular box of dissection implements, powders and strange pots of chemicals with Ali Douglas her friend from Queensland, Australia. Ali works as senior preparator in taxidermy at the Queensland Natural History Museum. She didn’t seem to mind Hannah’s suggestion that she spend an evening of her holiday doing what she normally does at work, i.e. skinning a dead owl. On the contrary, she was happy as anything to make an evening of it.

  In the far corner of the room, lights glowed on our Christmas tree. An owl decoration glared wonkily out from the top where an angel should have been. ‘Let’s do this. Then we can drink gin later,’ Ali suggested heartily. ‘Have you got tonic?’

  We sat around my dining table. Hannah wanted to learn the art of taxidermy so, knowing I had some specimens, she had requested we skin one of my owls – and Ali reassured me that it wouldn’t affect results at the research lab when I sent the owl’s body off.

  ‘They don’t need the skin; they probably only need the livers to test for toxins,’ she said. ‘We can save all that for them.’

  I had thawed out the owl and set up a camera to record footage of our evening’s work. Why, I wondered, would anyone want to reanimate a dead thing whose colours and life had faded and bring it back to an appearance of life? It seemed like a powerful metaphor suddenly, that during our era where species were declining at such a rate that we have named the phenomenon the sixth great extinction, we would wish to fake a revival of this one creature. Is it that we are diminished without these wild things, and to know them, to understand them, we need to come face to face with their impermanence?

  The video recorded the bird lying peacefully, still intact, then Rick moving through the room at speed with a rapid mumble about being outnumbered by three women, a dead thing and a proliferation of sharp knives.

  ‘I’m not usually squeamish,’ he said, closing the door behind him.

  Ali often gets requests to teach how to dissect animals, or to help out with taxidermy work. ‘And it’s always women. We have dozens of volunteers at the museum and they are almost always young women.’

  ‘Why is that?’ The gender imbalance seemed very bizarre.

  ‘I don’t know. It seems like some kind of fascination with dead things.’

  Is it that we might need to learn about death and loss before we can bring life into the world? Perhaps we’re just less afraid to admit we’re curious.

  Hannah, absorbed in making sure everything we needed was out of the box, was concentrating first on lining up her scalpels. Ali got more equipment out of the box: rat’s tooth tweezers for removing flesh from hard-to-reach places, pliers and scissors, wire cutters and fine metal scoops designed specifically for scooping the brains out of birds’ skulls. She had a selection of drill bits too, for working on the larger bones and for fixing specimens to wooden perches.

  How did Ali get into taxidermy? I wondered. She told me that it might have come from her upbringing – her father was a great naturalist, and it might have been watching him doing a little taxidermy as a hobby when she was young, but later in life she found herself becoming more and more interested in working at the city museum, and started out learning as a volunteer. She had developed a fascination with animals as she grew up but as an adult she moved into it from wo
rking on visual props and puppet-making for theatre. There she found a love for the skeletal nature of some forms of puppetry. Again, that bringing to life of lifeless creatures, that imaginative leap into sympathy for a dead thing, that fascination for the creaturely inside and underside of things, for how things work. But above all, taxidermy for Ali is about contact, conservation work and education: ‘It’s about teaching people about the animals. This is the only way many people can get up close and be able to look at them properly.’

  Is that what is behind this fixation humans have with cutting up animals and preserving them? A desire to get up close? In antiquity it was all about preservation, and at first taxidermy animals that had been brought back from far-flung places as skins and had never been seen in the flesh were set in misshapen wire frames. Inaccurate, conspicuously awkward-looking works soon became a scientific art, concerned with more than simply taxis (the Greek word for arrangement) and derma (meaning skin). As humans found better and better ways of preserving the skins of their quarry, taxidermists learned their skill from the increased demand for tanning leather in the nineteenth century. At the same time, people became gripped with curiosity about the strange foreign creatures brought back by explorers such as Captain James Cook who had shipped a kangaroo skin back to London from Australia as early as 1771. In 1798 when Captain John Hunter sent a pelt and sketch of a platypus it was thought to be a hoax. To be convinced, people wanted to see what these creatures would look like in real life.

  After a taxidermy competition in America in 1880 where specimens were judged on everyday lifelikeness and their realistic context, the appearance of these artifacts became less odd. Now a new scientific accuracy was required: Charles Darwin, for example, would not have been allowed to travel on HMS Beagle and collect his many samples, had he not been proficient in this key naturalist’s skill. The Natural History Museums of Paris and London drew increasing interest from the public – for the Great Exhibition of 1851 taxidermists from all over the world had gathered to present their now popular form of art and natural history.