The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (7 page)

Shakespeare echoes this Roman superstition in
Julius Caesar
, in which the dictator’s assassination is fore-shadowed by an unnatural daytime appearance: ‘… the bird of night did sit / Even at noonday, upon the marketplace, / Hooting and shrieking.’ He has Lady Macbeth call the owl the ‘fatal bellman, which gives the stern’st goodnight’. In
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
he writes that its ‘… scritching loud / Puts the wretch that lies in woe / In remembrance of a shroud’, and in
Henry VI
that ‘The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign’. A contemporary Austrian source describes the owl as ‘
ein Totenvogel, Sinnbild der Sünde
’ (‘a death-bird, symbol of sin’). Again in the sixteenth century, Edmund Spenser also calls it ‘death’s dreadful messenger’, and Robert Jones writes: ‘Come, doleful owl, the messenger of woe / Melancholy bird, companion of despaire.’ In fact, English poets from Geoffrey
Chaucer in the fourteenth century (who called the owl ‘the prophete of wo and myschaunce’) right up to Edward Thomas and Laurie Lee in the twentieth have been shamefully negative about this innocent and useful bird. In 1808 Oliver Goldsmith went so ridiculously far as to call owls ‘nocturnal robbers’, and complained that to hunt by night was simply unsporting!

The belief that hearing an owl calling on the roof or even nearby was a sign of an impending death in the household (‘and sings a dirge for dying souls’ – Thomas Vautor,
Sweet Suffolk Owl
,
c
. 1600) seems to have been almost universal among country folk for many centuries, and presumably originated in the simple fact that most natural deaths occur at night. The Chinese went further and believed that owls actually snatched away the souls of the dying, while there was an Arab tradition that owls embodied the spirits of unavenged victims of murder, crying out for blood. (More prosaically, it seems that in Wales the owl’s cry foretold another event that usually happened at night: it was a warning that a maiden was about to lose her virginity.)

Much of this might seem to answer the belligerent demand that I recall making to somebody whose apparent disapproval of my own domestic arrangements was becoming irritating: ‘So, what have you got against owls anyway, chum?’ But I would naturally object that Mumble’s forebears suffered an undeservedly bad press, and even today her fellow owls may sometimes continue to be slandered, if for rather different reasons.

* * *

In earlier times, when mankind came into direct contact with predatory carnivores that took their livestock and might threaten their children, there were good reasons for feeling hostility towards them. If you lived in a shack in a lonely forest clearing or depended upon your small flock for survival, you could be forgiven for not giving wolves or eagles the benefit of the doubt.

In modern times most of us have lost all instinctive understanding of the checks and balances of the natural world, to the extent that many people have become babyishly squeamish about the simplest facts of animal life. If the plastic-wrapped slab of supermarket meat has even become disconnected from the idea of a living cow, then it is not surprising that few people are aware of the indispensable role of predatory animals in the universal cycles of life. For instance, even those who enjoy an opportunity to see birds of prey on the wing may exclaim with prissy indignation about their ‘cruelty’ when they see one stoop for the kill, and imagine the muffled squeak of a small life ending.

In fact, of course, among the birds of prey owls may get something of a free pass in this respect; they look cuddly, they hide their killing talons under fluffy feathers, and they are out about their natural business only when most people are asleep. (The owls in the Harry Potter films are seen benignly carrying messages to the dining tables of Hogwarts – audiences are unlikely to give a thought to what they get
up to at their own mealtimes.) Moreover, the almost complete urbanization of Western Europe has made actual encounters with wild owls fairly rare. Since most British people now live in towns and cities, they will never be startled by the silent, ghostly-white swoop and blood-curdling shriek of a patrolling Barn Owl.

However, the fading of religious belief certainly has not made us less susceptible to ghost stories. After dark, our rational minds cannot always protect us from folk memories about these haunters of ruins and graveyards who come as winged messengers of death and calamity. Even the much less alarming hoot of a Tawny Owl as they walk past a dark wood makes some people’s neck-hairs prickle if they are not accustomed to being out of doors in the countryside at night. That mournful-sounding call seems to reinforce feelings of loneliness, and of near-helplessness in a surrounding darkness that might hide the approach of unknown dangers.

* * *

For obvious reasons, my own reaction to that sound has been very different ever since a Saturday afternoon in May 1978.

One summer, after Mumble had passed out of my life, a friend and I decided in a spirit of curiosity to try sleeping out in an ancient Hampshire yew wood that was notorious for being haunted. Supposedly, it is the site of the thousand-year-old mass grave of the victims of a battle between Vikings and West Saxons. I was told by somebody
who had grown up near Chichester that local children used to dare each other to venture into it, and a botanical artist had told another friend of mine that she suffered a panic reaction when she walked through it after being caught out un expectedly late. Even the warden of the nature park in which this unusual concentration of yew trees grows – a thoroughly practical outdoorsman – has admitted in print that he avoids it as soon as the sun begins to dip below the horizon, claiming to be conscious of a sinister atmosphere under its dark eaves.

Despite this evil reputation, Will and I didn’t have much hope of experiencing anything interesting. Nevertheless, after an evening at the nearest pub we trekked in with sleeping bags and water bottles, and settled down among the ancient, riven trunks and the caves of ground-sweeping branches. Will, a long-time Territorial Army rifleman, efficiently scraped a small pit for his hipbone, slithered inside his ‘green slug’ and was gently snoring within minutes. Less accustomed to roughing it, I lay awake for a long while, listening to the breeze and the occasional faint patter of drizzle. My emotional antennae were consciously tuned to pick up any chilling sensations, but I was completely disappointed. As my eyes at last grew heavy there suddenly came, from about two trees away, the tremulous call of a Tawny Owl. I rolled over to sleep, comforted like a child and feeling foolish about the whole ghost-hunting exercise. In my world, nothing wicked could be abroad if there was a tawny nearby.

SINCE IT WAS
the last week of May 1978 when I collected ‘Marmite Sandwich’ from Water Farm as a fledgling roughly thirty days out of the egg, she must have hatched in late April. I decided that, like Her Majesty, my owl should have an official birthday. Because I have a connection with the British old comrades’ association of the French Foreign Legion, I took the entirely arbitrary decision to celebrate it on the auspicious 30 April – the Legion’s ‘Camerone Day’, when I would be at a party anyway.

My owl’s legal identity was ‘39 RAH 78 U’, stamped in black on a yellow plastic bangle worn discreetly around her feathery left ankle. The name ‘Mumble’ just came into my head after a few days of listening to her quiet conversations with herself, me and the world at large. (I must emphasize that this all happened about thirty years before a major American animation studio gave the same name to a fictitious penguin with showbiz ambitions. I have always been vaguely suspicious about that, but I don’t recall that anyone from Hollywood ever met my owl.)

* * *

Before I brought Mumble home I had cleaned out Wellington’s old balcony cage, and after some thought I had also constructed a second, indoor cage on a worktop against the window in my kitchen. I was not sure how our routine was going to work out, but after my experiences with Wellington it seemed sensible to prepare for a certain amount of flexibility in the domestic arrangements. I modified a kit for making garden compost bins – wide-mesh panels of plastic-covered wire grill, fixed together with snap-on rubber clips. This produced an airy metre-square cube; I installed a door at the front fitted with a doorstep perch, a couple of sawn-branch perches in the rear corners, and the usual thick carpet of newspaper on the floor.

I was determined never to tether Mumble, and I wanted to give her the freedom to spend plenty of time loose in the flat – or at least, in the circuit provided by the hallway, bathroom, kitchen and living room (common sense suggested barring her from my bedroom and office, though I would occasionally have moments of weakness – she could twist me round her little claw). Since it is impossible to housetrain a bird, that meant that I would have to accept natural accidents with a degree of equanimity: in short, there was bound to be a fair amount of owl-crap around the place, and I had better get used to the idea.

Tawnies are cleanly birds compared to Barn Owls and almost never foul their nesting places, but this means that
they let fly when they are roosting. Although I knew that I would never be able to persuade her to defecate in one predictable place, I did think it worthwhile to provide her with as invitingly comfortable a facility as possible. I built a large tray-perch by fixing a sturdy, L-shaped ‘gallows’ branch upright on a big wooden bread tray that I spotted in a skip behind a supermarket, lined the whole thing generously with newspaper, and set it up on a small table in the living room with a good view of the windows. (For some long-forgotten commercial reason the bread tray had the word ‘Perfection’ stencilled boldly along one side. When Mumble chose to sit in fat contentment immediately above this caption, the impression of upholstered mandarin conceit was striking.)

I knew that when she was free to choose she would prefer to sit high. The most obvious perches would therefore be on the tops of half-open doors, and it would be sensible to cover the floors around these with newspaper. I also taped a good many thin plastic sheets around the place, to protect walls from splash-back and to cover furniture that was seldom used when I was alone in the flat. This routine was going to be demanding, but that was an inevitable price for sharing my quarters with a wild creature.

It was obvious that I would once again have to recruit my next-door neighbour Lynne as an essential ally, since Mumble was going to be spending a lot of time on the balcony only a few feet from her bedroom window. When I hesitantly explained to her that I was planning to acquire
a potentially songful flatmate she took it amazingly well – and would continue to do so throughout the time she had to put up with Mumble’s occasional serenades. After a few months she moved out and sublet her flat, but the reason was marriage rather than owl fatigue, and her tolerance would be inherited by a couple of her subsequent tenants. (One of these was my old friend Gerry, an illustrator with whom I often worked closely; he had little choice in the matter, since this unusual condition of his tenancy was explained in advance.)

Thus prepared as well as I could be, and with plenty of chicks laid down in the freezer, I collected my new owl from Water Farm and successfully sneaked her up to my flat without attracting attention. When we began our experiment in living together at the end of May 1978 we quickly settled into a vastly more satisfactory relationship than I had ever known with Wellington.

* * *

‘Manning’ Mumble was never a problem – she was tame from the first moment I met her. She explored the flat with interest, on foot or by means of long, hopping jumps. When I needed to put her in the balcony cage in the morning before I left for work, it was usually no trouble getting her into the cardboard box or basket so that I could carry her out there. She seemed to approve of her accommodation, and usually disappeared into her hutch straight away before I had negotiated my way out again through the Double-Reciprocating Owl Valve. When I returned in
the evening and went out to fetch her, I had to wait for her to go through a rather lengthier waking-up routine before she was ready to be sociable and allowed me to catch her, but she was perfectly happy as soon as she was released into the living room.

Since there was no need to use feeding as a training aid, I would give her her chicks last thing at night – this seemed the obvious thing to do with an owl. As with Wellington, I always gave a particular whistle when I had her supper ready to feed her and at no other time, and, unlike Wellington, she got the idea within two or three nights. Sometimes I didn’t even have to whistle – she learned to recognize the rustle of a plastic bag when I opened the fridge, and came without prompting. I would throw her chicks into the opened night cage in the kitchen; when she had hopped in after them I closed the cage, and usually turned the light off and left her to it. (Some nights she seemed reluctant to be ‘banged up’, so when she had finished the messy business of eating I would reopen the cage and leave her loose during the night.)