The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (27 page)

* * *

Occasionally, but not often, Mumble would be mobbed by small birds who spotted her in daytime, despite the ivy camouflaging her in her dark private corner. From my desk upstairs I would hear this begin, usually with the repeated alarm call of a blackbird, and by the time I had got to the window to look down a number of smaller birds – sparrows, finches and tits – would be gathering as near to the aviary as they dared. They moved around nervously from perch to perch, flapping their wings and cocking their tails, while delivering a cacophony of alarm calls to advertise Mumble’s presence to any other potential prey. This raucous scolding might go on for several minutes at a time, but she seemed able to ignore it completely – she might blink, but she didn’t even shuffle on her perch, and certainly didn’t emerge from her cover in a threatening
way. Apparently this is normal even in the wild, where there is no wire mesh between the owl and its tormentors. The racket has only a nuisance value, but I was impressed by Mumble’s patience – I got more irritated by the monotonous hysteria than she did.

* * *

I was vaguely disappointed that the first actual kill I saw her make (beetles don’t count) was an earthworm. I had read that tawnies often hunt worms on the ground when damp weather brings them to the surface, but although I congratulated her when I disturbed her eating it one dreary day in March 1982, I couldn’t help feeling that this was nothing to write home about. I supposed that it was as much as I could realistically expect; a worm on the surface would be easy to catch, and was not entirely unlike the shoelaces she had loved playing with as a fledgling. More significantly, Mumble had never been given the slightest education in the subject of brown furry things that ran about on four legs; if one scuttled across the aviary how would she even recognize it as supper, let alone seize the brief opportunity to catch it? (Incidentally, worm-loving readers may be consoled to learn that throughout the speedy process of ingestion the luckless creature maintained an air of stupefied boredom, displaying no more animation than the length of spaghetti that its final exit so closely called to mind.)

However, within the month Mumble proved that she had indeed taught herself how to kill for food without the
aid of instruction, and that a fairly steady stream of the local rodent population were carelessly taking shortcuts through the aviary. In good weather I quite often left Mumble out at night if she seemed reluctant to come indoors, so these fatal encounters may have taken place more regularly after dark, leaving no evidence at the scene by the time I came out to her the next morning. Whether or not that was true (and it seems most likely), the kills that I was aware of seemed mostly to take place during the day, and usually during the spring and early summer. This pattern repeated itself every year from 1982 onwards, and the following notes are a compiled selection from her game book:

First-time kill? I went out to the aviary late at night, and as soon as I opened the back door of the house I heard her giving muffled, brassy whoops, as if she was playing a trumpet muted with a rolled-up pair of socks. She had her mouth full, of course – with about 75 per cent of a self-caught mouse. She was very proud and fierce, but seemed a bit undecided about what to do next – after all, if this
is
her first time, she has never ‘been on the course’. She brought it with her into the basket, and carried it around the kitchen for a bit. When I opened the night cage she took it inside with her, and later polished it off quite happily – in addition to her suppertime chick.

I came home in the evening to find that she had caught another mouse or vole. She was dragging its headless corpse around in her beak, and when she saw me she started making a great triumphalist fuss.

She caught another field mouse; she must have killed it this morning, because I put her out at breakfast time and noticed it when I visited her at about noon. It was perfectly unmarked apart from a broken neck and a neat, surgical incision up one side of its chest. She cawed boastfully while flying round the aviary at top speed, making loud, flashy landings and waving the corpse about. At last she stashed it inside her hutch. She spent more of the day than usual up and about, sitting slitty-eyed on perches watching the nearest greenery. In my mind’s eye I could see the thought-bubble: ‘Here I sit, the keen-eyed hunter – don’t come on to
my
patch unless you’re tired of living!’ In the evening she fished her mouse out again, did a repeat performance of the laps of honour, and finally took it to her shelf to eat.

One night when I went out to her I found her obviously excited, but could not work out why. She was hopping around, squeaking and ‘pointing’ at something just outside the aviary. Poking among the long grass in that direction,
I finally discovered a small crashed bat at the foot of the wire mesh. I found this distressing; the pipistrelle was a delightful creature, and one wing was hopelessly broken. Mumble was clearly hoping that I would discover my inner Nero; I rebuked her, shocked, and – wincingly – put the little thing out of its misery.

* * *

Why didn’t I feel equally sentimental about the rodents that occasionally wandered into the aviary, through the thick grass and weeds that I allowed to grow up both inside and outside the mesh?

To me, Mumble was a delightful pet; to any field mouse or bank vole that happened to look up during its last two seconds of life, she was an unspeakable nightmare – huge against the sky, lightning-fast, utterly silent, with great staring eyes and eight enormous talons reaching wide enough to envelop its head or grip halfway around its body. When she hit one like a truck she compressed the whole power of her foot, leg and chest muscles into the minute surface area of her claws. Immediately, she would crush the skull or bite down to break the neck; at least they must have died almost instantaneously. I suspect that I might have been tempted to react differently if I had ever seen them alive in their last moments, but in fact the only evidence of their fate that I ever got to see was after the deed was done (and sometimes the only trace of mouse-icide was a suspiciously dark-coloured pellet the following day).

Of course, I had no way of knowing how many kills Mumble made, since she must often have disposed of the evidence before I saw it. Every now and then, when I went out to say hello to her after getting home from London on a spring or summer evening, I would find her sitting on her private perch like a feathery Buddha, four-square and solidly planted, breast puffed out, with a preoccupied, upturned face and slitted eyes – and with a small tail dangling from the corner of her half-open beak. On one of these occasions she was having such trouble swallowing this
al fresco
meal that she actually bounced up and down on her heels while trying to gulp it down. I found myself laughing out loud, and could feel nothing but pleasure that Mumble was tasting at least one of the satisfactions of an owl’s natural life.

* * *

Drama this morning. For some extraordinary reason, a thrush squeezed its way in through the feeding-hole of the aviary, and got a shocking surprise when it discovered who lived there. Mobbing was one thing, but mobbing close up and single-handed quite another. Mumble was horrified by all the thrashing about and screaming, and flew from perch to perch to keep away from the wretched thing. Eventually I had to put her in her basket and take her into the kitchen, returning to chase the hysterical thrush out of the aviary door before bringing the owl out again. Once I
had expelled the suicidal fool Mumble behaved with dignity, being too embarrassed to refer again to this unfortunate incident.

It’s a drowsy summer teatime, and I’m enjoying it in a deckchair. Some time ago I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, and turned to see a large and characteristically fearless grey squirrel hopping down the lawn, pausing to grab the occasional snack. It then ran up the fence beside the oak tree, from there to the tree trunk, and skittered up to the first branch. Mumble was on her doorstep perch, motionless, and following it with big eyes; she was her usual rotund shape, not in the tall, thin cos-lettuce format she adopts when expecting serious trouble. On the fence-top close to the oak trunk sat Buster the cat. He looked up longingly at the squirrel, but couldn’t convince himself to try to climb after it – long experience has probably taught him the futility of following squirrels up trees.

The three animals held this tableau for moments on end. It’s odd, but there’s no question about it: Mumble still reacts to any other cat that comes into the garden with a gunfighter’s suspicion, but these days she seems to be almost entirely relaxed about Buster. Professional courtesy, as between lawyers?

* * *

To call a carnivorous animal ‘cruel’ for playing its part in Nature’s constant cycle of eat or be eaten is self-evident nonsense (so far as we know, humans are the only animals capable of conscious cruelty). But that doesn’t mean that we can be unmoved by the spectacle of suffering. Personally, I’m grateful that the wildlife cameraman’s film is edited to end as soon as the wolves bring down the young caribou – I have no desire to watch the drawn-out horror that follows until the poor creature finally dies, however natural it is.

While I never had any illusions about Mumble’s true nature, she did not give me a real demonstration of it until a quiet, sunny Saturday afternoon one May, when a large wood pigeon was eating a newly seeded patch of my lawn. I clapped and shooed it off, repeatedly, but it always came back – until it made the fateful mistake of landing on the mesh roof of the aviary. Mumble had been dozing in her usual shaded private corner next to her hutch, camouflaged by the thick ivy above and on two sides, but by now she was fully alert. As the pigeon settled on her roof she came out of cover in a killing rush, did a mid-air back-flip below it, and struck up through the mesh at it with both feet.

She got most of her talons deep into the pigeon’s body, and hung there belly to belly with it, supported by her gently beating wings. Both birds were silent, but Mumble was open-beaked with excitement, and increasingly spattered from feet to face with ruby-red blood that glinted in the sunlight. The mesh in between the two birds
prevented a clean kill, and Mumble’s locked claws prevented the pigeon escaping. This stalemate might have lasted all afternoon; I couldn’t allow such a medieval death, so I dispatched the pigeon with an air-rifle pellet through the head. Persuading Mumble to let go of it took a long time, but eventually she got tired of hanging on her back in mid-air, and I took the remains into the aviary for her.

She pounced on the corpse avidly and started trying to butcher it, but with little success. City tawnies catch feral pigeons, but this big wood pigeon was a larger kill than a rural tawny would normally make in the wild, with tougher feathers (countrymen will tell you tales of hearing their shotgun pellets rattling off a pigeon’s wings at long range). Mumble was not really trained for dealing with a bounty like this. She repeatedly stood on it and tried to pluck a bit of it with her beak, but it kept rolling over and spilling her off. She did eventually pluck and eat about 20 per cent of it, but by the Sunday afternoon she had given it up as a bad job, and I tossed the rest into the bottom of the hedge for one of her less fastidious four-footed colleagues to find.

* * *

Nowadays real intimacies were limited to the lazy weekend mornings when we shared the kitchen, preening each other and enjoying each other’s company for a couple of hours at a time. I still took great delight in this, and was relieved that at most times of the year it did not take more than a few minutes for us to reforge our mutual closeness,
even after five-day intervals when – like a busy couple working different shifts – we really only saw one another when we passed in the doorway morning and evening.

In December 1982 this semi-detached relationship was tested to the full when I spent a month away in Cape Town, courtesy of my generous friends Angus and Patricia. (I was ready for it, being unwell after a period of insane overwork following the Falklands War. As a professional editor, I cannot resist boasting about one of the symptoms – I had begun to leave blood on the typewriter keys …) The month passed in a pleasant haze of late lie-ins, cool wine, and long, rambling conversations in warm sunshine amid the jacaranda trees and bougainvillea, on a hillside above the sparkling blue of the Indian Ocean. I also enjoyed several evenings in a pub that I later discovered is well known to many long-distance travellers – the Brass Bell, in the old railway station on the ocean front at Kalk Bay. Some of these sessions of beer, steaks and rock-’n’-roll were happily spent with my nephew Graham, who had made the trip the hard way, riding a motorbike all the way from Hampshire to the Cape of Good Hope.

Meanwhile, Mumble was spending the whole month in her aviary, where she was faithfully fed by my kind neighbours – at some risk to their fingers when poking her chicks through the feeding hole (she was too impatient to wait until the mail had actually dropped through the letterbox). I had feared that this long separation might lead to a permanent estrangement, but when I came home she knew me the moment I came in sight, and when I went inside the aviary
she jumped to my shoulder at once. I had no trouble persuading her to get into the basket, or to spend the next several hours free in the kitchen while we got to know one another again. She went around the room whooping into all possible holes and re-exploring the nooks and crannies, before settling happily on her perch on top of the larder cupboard.

* * *

My working life changed quite radically in the mid-1980s, when a colleague and I started up our own publishing company. At first we produced a military history magazine, and later a growing list of books, from an attic office high above Gerrard Street in London’s Chinatown. As anybody who has tried it knows, launching an underfunded infant business and trying to steer it through choppy economic seas is about the scariest and most relentlessly demanding occupation on earth (excepting, of course, those that involve live ammunition). With these added responsibilities my working days grew longer and more intense, punctuated by business trips such as the obligatory, health-wrecking October week at the Frankfurt Book Fair.