The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (8 page)

While waiting for me to get up and let her out in the morning after nights spent in the kitchen cage, she would amuse herself by tearing up her newspaper ‘bedroom carpet’ and dropping tiny shreds of it out of the cage until they formed a drift on the lino floor below – sweeping these up and replacing her cage lining became an almost daily chore. Ripping things up seemed to be her favourite game, and since her curiosity was insatiable I soon learned not to leave anything vulnerable lying around.

When she was loose in the flat and I wanted her to come to me for any other reason I would catch her eye and tap a finger on my shoulder, and she would hop up at once – or, more often, down. As soon as she moved in she was able to jump from any convenient bit of furniture up to the top of the open living-room door. From there she had an unobstructed view of the whole room and of the distant world outside the window-wall, and it immediately became her favourite perch. At weekends, when I let her stay loose around the flat all day, she would doze comfortably on the door top for hours at a time. (When she awoke from a daytime snooze she often gave a little whistling sneeze – ‘
snit!
’ – followed by a shake of her head, and two or three ruminative beak-clacks. If I picked her up while she was still a bit dozy she stepped back on to my hand trustfully but with a slightly careful gait, like a drunk concentrating on negotiating a flight of steps.)

From her first arrival in the flat Mumble pursued the natural ‘branching’ behaviour of a fledgling, manifested particularly in her case by a fascination with exploring all cupboards, corners and crannies. If I happened to leave a cardboard box or an empty carrier bag lying around, she was into it like a venturesome kitten; sometimes she would stay inside it for quite a while, and I occasionally found her actually lying down inside, flat on her front like a broody chicken, with her head cocked back. If I left the sliding doors of the long wardrobe in my hallway open even a crack, I would soon hear a croon or – after the first couple of weeks – a fluting war-whoop, quiet but insistent, echoing
from deep inside it: ‘
w-o-o-o … w-o-o-o … w-o-o-o
’. (It reminded me of the noise we made as children by flipping a hand over our mouths when playing cowboys and Indians.) She would clamber in the dark inside the wardrobe from shoulder to shoulder of the coats and jackets hanging there until she reached the deepest corner. Were the accompanying whoops, I wondered, anything to do with some instinct to ask if a dark hole was already occupied by somebody else? She did not seem to be seeking refuge from anything, but simply enjoying active exploration. (Although some owl species are known for using underground burrows, I’ve never come across any reference to tawnies doing this.)

One day, when I started to worry about not being able to find her in any of her usual haunts, a noticeably muffled call led me into the kitchen, and down on my knees to peer under the table fixed to one wall. I had completely forgotten that, hidden under it, a hole was cut in the plaster board wall to give access to the water stopcock. Luckily it was too small to accommodate even Mumble’s remarkably compressible body, but she had stuck her head into it, and was warbling monotonously into the thickness of the wall. She kept this up for several minutes, bobbing and twisting her head as she whooped into the darkness, and seemed to listen for a response. I never could decide if she could hear the enticing scuttle of vermin in there, or if it was just another example of her general fixation with intriguing dark corners.

* * *

Her tameness is apparently unaffected by growing, though she starts, and sometimes flies to my shoulder, at loud noises – a gunshot on TV, say, or loud music when I change radio channels (she’s fine with Thomas Tallis or Linda Ronstadt, but is less keen on Stravinsky or the Stones). She has even behaved beautifully when visitors have come round to see her. [My friend] Bella brought [her daughters] over for tea the other afternoon, and they were charmed by her. She let them sit close to her on the sofa and stroke her fluffy chest; the girls made satisfactory ‘
aaah
’ noises, and it was as much as I could do to stop them actually picking her up in their arms to give her a hug.

She is growing at an astonishing rate, but still looks like a stuffed toy – though a badly frayed one, with lots of feathers pushing through diminishing patches of down (I find tiny bits of shed down everywhere). Her colouring is more marked now than a couple of weeks ago. The facial disc is sharp, with a hedge of tiny dark brown feathers growing backwards from its edges, and a dart of dark brown edged with white growing downwards between her eyes. The crown of her head is still covered with pale grey fluff, but this gapes apart when she bends her head, and is retreating backwards – soon it will be limited to the back of her neck. Otherwise, feathers are pushing
through and joining up all over her: first came the wings and tail, then the back, then the breast and the edges of her face, and now the head. Since she was about ten weeks old her breast has been ermine – downy, creamy-white feathers with dark brown central streaks – but there are still thick, fluffy grey petticoats low down on her body.

During the two months she has been living here her flying skills have improved steadily, from accurate, quite long-range powered jumps to deliberate flights from Point A to Point B. From her first day she could already make a single daring leap from the back of this armchair, out the living-room door, across the end of the hallway, through the open kitchen door opposite and on to the kitchen table – a good 12 feet. By about her fifth week here she was completing fairly complex circuits-and-bumps around several points, and was even managing to hover briefly in mid-air. But her landings are still lousy – very hard, barely controlled crash-landings.

* * *

When I came into the living room with this notebook she was sitting calmly on the back of my armchair. When I sat down she pranced up beside my head and started pecking at my hair. Then she hopped down on to the coffee table beside me, and from there to the right arm of the chair close by my elbow. She is sitting there now, 6 inches from my moving pen, apparently fascinated by it. With quiet care, she lifts her right foot and gently but firmly stabs the
wrist of my sweater, before bending to give it a chew, but her heart isn’t in it. Her head bobs and weaves slowly, eyes following the pen.

Every minute or so, when my writing hand reaches the end of a line nearest to her, she has a gentle chew at my hand, the pen or the edge of the page; then she seems to lose conviction, making vague claw-passes in mid-air like a punchy old boxer. Occasionally she jumps to my wrist and rides it for a while, which makes writing tricky. Sometimes she loses interest and rotates her head on its ‘ball mount’, staring straight upwards or over at the windows, but mostly she remains intent on the moving pen. She jumps from my wrist to the coffee table, has a quick fluff-up, stands briefly on one leg, then hops back to my raised knee; when the edge of the notebook nudges her she complains, with a soft ‘
kew … kew
’.

Her vocabulary seems to be changing. For the first couple of weeks it was a single-note squeak or croon; she apparently speaks through her nostrils, since her beak remains nearly or actually closed while her throat-feathers swell. The only other sound she made was a rapid chittering when annoyed or frustrated – sometimes loud, emphatic and accompanied by beak-clacks, and sometimes a low, evil muttering. But over the past couple of months her range has developed, to a broken two-note sound like a rusty gate creaking, and very occasionally she has tried out a long, wavering whistle, as if she is practising for a full hoot.

At the weekend I’m going down to [my sister’s home
at] Petersfield, and I’m taking Mumble with me – she’ll be comfortable enough in the summerhouse overnight.

The weekend at Val’s went well. I had the rear seats of the car folded down, and rigged a plastic sheet over the backs of the front seats and right back over the rear cargo area. (I also decided to wear my ratty old field jacket while driving – I don’t want owl-crap down the back of my shoulder when I’m wearing anything halfway decent.) She was quite happy in her temporary overnight quarters, and when I brought her indoors she let the family handle her. When she sat on [my nephew] Graham’s shoulder she was calmer than he was – which was fair enough, since it was his first time.

During the drive back on Sunday night she rode the back of the passenger seat for a while, and sometimes went stomping back over the plastic sheeting so she could look out the rear window – she did this when the radio boomed out the choral opening to ‘Zadok the Priest’. But she spent most of the trip on the back of the driving seat just behind my neck, looking sideways or peering forwards around my head – silent, calm and balanced. Occasionally I felt a warm, companionable little nudge, as she turned and pushed her head against my cheek or ear like a sleepy child. The incredible softness of it brought back a sudden sensory memory, of my five-year-old self sneaking into the bathroom to experiment with one of Dad’s old badger-hair shaving brushes.

When we got home and into the underground car park she had to go back into the cardboard box for the trip up in the lift, with me holding the open side of the box against my chest. (I’m still using a box to smuggle her in and out, because it’s less of a giveaway than a basket in case I run into somebody in the lift.) This time Mumble absolutely hated being put back into the box, and all the way up she clung flat to my chest with half-open wings, like a moth – though luckily she never hoots on these occasions. As soon as we were inside the flat and I eased my grip, she squeezed out through the widening gap, whiskery face first, and flew to her door-top perch, where she stood shaking out her feathers and giving me dirty looks.

* * *

When Mumble was sitting calmly on the back of my chair, I could turn my face and nuzzle her chest, with no reaction beyond a quiet croon and a shifting of her feet; but I didn’t try this on those occasions when she showed she was in a feisty mood.

Typically, she would walk across the floor and jump up to my raised foot, then climb up the incline of my shin with the aid of half-beating wings. Pausing on my knee, she would then pounce into the crook of my bent arm, excavating it like a terrier, as if pretending that there was a mouse down among the side-cushions. If my sleeve was rolled up she used to peck her way gently up the hairs on my arm, as if she was eating corn-on-the-cob. She might then jump up to the middle of my chest, ‘footing’ it
vigorously and making wheezing noises (she seemed to find it irritating when I was wearing a sweater, and would lift her feet fastidiously as if trying to get her claws out of sticky tar). These mock-hunts usually developed into pecking at my beard and moustache; if I got bored with this I would catch her beak gently between my knuckles, but there was clearly an inhibition at work here – she always pulled her punches, and even in her rare ‘berserker’ moods she never threatened my face.

She could often be diverted by the rattle of my dropping a pencil on to the marble coffee table at my elbow. She would transfer all her attention to kicking it, picking it up, gnawing it, dropping it, then starting all over again, and sometimes she carried it off to continue the game elsewhere. I rigged up a swinging pencil for her, hanging crossways at the end of a leather thong from the gallows of her tray-perch, low down so that she could stand in the tray and reach it with a raised foot. She seemed to like this toy – she sat holding it, biting it, knocking it away and grabbing it as it swung back again.

I noticed that after any kind of exciting activity she seemed to get tired quite easily, and went off for a brief snooze to recharge her batteries. Sometimes this meant sleeping one-legged on her door top, but at other times she would seek out a favoured front corner of the shelf inside the top of the hallway wardrobe, and actually fold her legs up under her chest and lie down flat on her front.

* * *

Despite Mumble’s occasional over-excitable teenage outbursts, she was much more often docile, and in this mood she definitely enjoyed being ‘preened’. When she was sitting close to me I would stroke the top of her head gently with a finger. At my first touch she would twist and ‘gimbal’ her head around a bit, and after the first few strokes she went quiet and dopey, eyes slitted, crouching low and puffing out her feathers as she enjoyed the sensation.

I was not expecting any deliberate gestures of companionship on Mumble’s part, and it came as a pleasant surprise when she started initiating such preening sessions herself. These most often happened when she saw me for the first time in the morning. If she had been in the night cage, then when I walked into the kitchen she jumped down to her newspaper floor and warbled a quiet series of long, liquid ‘
w-o-o-o … w-o-o-o
’ whoops, with her head low down in a corner of the cage. When I opened the cage door she hopped up on to the doorstep perch and sat blinking up at me sleepily; I would blink back, and when I leaned down to her she turned her face up to me, closed her eyes, and nibbled gently at my beard while I nuzzled her. After a few moments of these mutual greetings she would hop rather deliberately up on to my shoulder, and ride me around the flat until she decided which perch she fancied.

I didn’t always shut her up at night, and when I emerged from the bedroom after nights during which I had left her loose in the flat she would be sitting in the semi-darkness on her favourite night perch – the top of the
half-open bathroom door. When I went in and turned on the light she jumped over to the shower rail, then to the top of the wall cabinet, where she sat bobbing and weaving, and pecking absent-mindedly at my hand when I rummaged blindly for the shaving soap. When I had washed my neck and started lathering it, she hopped to my shoulder without prompting and turned to face the mirror. She never made the classic animal’s response to a mirror – trying to find the other owl behind it – which was intriguing, because she had only ever caught the briefest glimpses of other owls when she had been a hatchling and during her couple of days at Water Farm. For an animal to recognize itself in a mirror argues a degree of self-consciousness, which is generally considered to be a sign of high intelligence. Sometimes she started clicking her beak through the side of my hair and beard, making a quiet machine-gunning sound.