The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (9 page)

When I got into the shower after completing my shave she seldom showed any interest, for which I was grateful. On the first couple of mornings she had sat on the shower rail and watched me beadily, making me wonder uneasily whether she might try to explore me more directly when I turned the water off. For some reason, it was on occasions when I had no clothes on that my eyes were most drawn to her talons.

* * *

She normally wandered off when I turned the shower on; but every day without fail, soon after the water noise
stopped – and usually while I was sitting on the side of the bath, towelling my feet – I would hear a questioning croon, and her face appeared again, wide-eyed with interest, around the bottom of the bathroom door. For some unknown reason she had decided that this was the perfect opportunity to get her head preened.

She advanced across the floor in two or three great leaps, with half-open wings fanning slowly, until the last jump carried her up to my knee. Then she would shuffle closer along my thigh until she was beneath my chin, arrange herself neatly, give another croon or two, and lift her face towards mine with beak half open.

When I gave in and bent lower to nuzzle her head, she flicked the nictating membranes – the inner ‘second eyelids’ – across her eyes while she twisted and rubbed her head against the gentle pressure. Steadily, she sank further down on her undercarriage and fluffed out her body feathers, retracting her head into her ‘shawl’ until she looked rather like a single fluffy ball with a set of features on its top surface. Her feathers smelt clean, warm, woolly, and sort of …
biscuity
. If I stopped nuzzling she squeaked insistently, and she seemed to enjoy it most when I rubbed the close triangle of short feathers immediately above her beak and between her eyes. After a few moments of this she would start twisting her head again, presumably bringing new itchy areas into contact – often, the feathered flaps of the big ear-trenches hidden behind the edges of her facial disc.

When I finally got fed up with the crick in my spine
and convinced her that the session was over, Mumble would shake herself vigorously, and jump up to my shoulder to look around brightly for new amusements. This was my permission to move.

* * *

Mumble’s usual evening-patrol routine involved short flights from chair backs to door tops, to her tray-perch, then down to the living-room floor to walk along the foot of the window-wall, then up to a bookshelf, then out into the darkened hallway to fly to the telephone table, then back to my chair. She occasionally took a short stroll on a glass-topped bookshelf, clicking along with a gingerly gait as if walking on ice. Infrequently, a hollow echo of this same ‘gunfighter with spurs’ sound betrayed the fact that she had flown down into the empty bath and was stomping up and down there – perhaps in search of anything intriguing that might have crawled up through the plughole.

When I wasn’t watching her, there might be a sudden crash as she leapt from some perch straight down on to the plastic sheet covering the sofa. She would give it three or four quick, killing kicks, then move around on the unstable surface of the cushions with wings nearly spread and ‘mantled’ downwards and forwards, in the pose that raptors adopt to cover and defend a kill. Then, satisfied with her victory, she would fly up to one of her perches and fluff her feathers, flick her wings back neatly like coat-tails, and give a final little shuffle before settling down and tucking one foot ‘in her pocket’.

I never tired of watching her floor-walking, largely because she found it so interesting herself. Before she jumped down there from a perch she considered the drop zone carefully, head on one side, as if making calculations before she committed herself to a plan. Once down, she would stroll across to sit at the foot of the window-wall in her ‘cottage loaf’ pose – bum planted squarely on the carpet, legs retracted so that only the tips of her talons showed under her skirts – and gaze around alertly with wide eyes. Often she seemed to spot some invisible real or imaginary prey a few inches in front of her toes – which was odd, because I knew that her short-range vision was bad. Nevertheless, she would stare fixedly at one spot on the carpet before jumping up to full leg stretch, pouncing with murderous violence and ‘killing’ it. She might repeat this game for a full minute at a time.

If something outside the window-wall caught her attention she sprang into movement, extending her legs like a chicken standing up and making a bobbing run along beside the dark glass, balancing herself with wings billowing half open like a pantomime villain’s cloak. This ‘sinister stalking’ effect – reminiscent of the cartoon cat Sylvester trying to sneak up on the canary Tweetypie – was particularly amusing when I saw her dashing from behind one bit of cover to another, stopping, then making the next short rush. Naturally, she liked tunnelling into dark corners under low bits of furniture, but also stomping around boisterously underneath things that had a taller clearance. Predictably, the newspapers on various parts of
the floor would often suffer catastrophically under her joyous attacks.

* * *

I did try giving her a ping-pong ball to play with, but after kicking it around listlessly a couple of times she completely lost interest. Since she couldn’t get a claw into its hard surface, she didn’t seem to think it was worth chasing – crumpled-up balls of newspaper were much more fun. She was also delighted with a gift from one of my friends: a light, soft plush ball of the kind that mums hang from the top of prams and cots. She killed this within seconds, bore it up to her door top (with some balance difficulties during the flight – it was nearly the size of a tennis ball) and proceeded to disembowel it, expertly. Within fifteen minutes the floor was littered far and wide with its stuffing of synthetic fluff. I didn’t want her to swallow any of this dubious stuff, which was no doubt made from some petrochemical by-product, and it was clear that if I got her any more of these toys they wouldn’t last more than minutes, so I didn’t repeat that particular treat.

For some unfathomable reason, she seemed to be fascinated by my feet. If she was down on the floor she stalked them silently when I walked past, making me nervous that I might step on her. When she was up on her door top she often watched them moving past below her with intent focus, calculating their range, course and speed before curling her talons over the edge of her perch, dropping her head between them to keep her eyes centred
on the target, and then launching herself unerringly.

I soon began to wonder if the real objective of these attacks was my shoelaces, which seemed to be a constant temptation. Sometimes she would stroll innocently across the living-room floor to sit on the carpet beside my chair, her quiet little head apparently watching the TV screen, but before long I would feel the tap of her landing on one of my crossed feet. Settling herself firmly, she bowed her head and began nibbling and tugging at my laces. Her sharp, hooked bill was shockingly destructive, and when I could no longer be bothered to keep shooing her off she was capable in minutes of reducing a piece of woven lace to a drift of separated, broken threads on the carpet below my feet. I soon had to replace all my laces with leather thongs; the discarded worm-corpses of the woven ones, discovered in wastepaper baskets, were among her favourite playthings.

* * *

Tonight was a first – it seems trivial, but it’s yet another pleasing contrast to my experience with Wellington. Normally, when I go into the balcony cage to fetch her indoors after coming home in the evening, I wait for her to go through her routine of ‘whooping’ in the corner of her hutch before emerging, and then sitting on her doorstep perch for a couple of minutes while she gets herself organized. Meanwhile, I stand with the cardboard box
under my left arm, open end towards her. When she seems to be settled, I reach out and slide my right hand up behind her legs so that she steps backwards on to it; then I guide hand and owl together into the box, simultaneously swivelling it round against my chest to leave only a narrow crack from which to extract my hand. I then try to get back indoors before her frustration provokes painful efforts to dig her way out through my chest. This may be accompanied by chittering, and a furious, whiskery little face trying to squeeze its way into view around the edge of the box.

Tonight, as I stood waiting for her to finish blinking, yawning, stretching, crapping, shaking her feathers and generally going through her waking-up routine, she looked at the box calmly, measured the distance and jumped right into it. Then she turned round so that she would be facing the right way ‘when the lift door opened’, and stayed still and quiet while I went through the performance of extracting us both through the Double-Reciprocating Owl Valve and into the living room.

* * *

Her vocabulary is continuing to expand rapidly. Her range of sounds still includes the original cheeps, croons and squeaks, the more recent creaking whistles, and the habitual, tremulous Indian whoops that are always directed into some enclosed place. Beak-clacking is a sign of annoyance, but apparently it’s not always aimed at other people. She also does it sometimes when simply waking from a
doze, alternating short bursts of clacking with sneezes. The first time I managed to watch her closely while she did it I discovered that she wasn’t actually snapping her beak open and shut at all – the beak stays half open. I suspect she must be snapping her tongue from its resting place pressed into the floor of her beak, and the noise is the ‘clop’ of broken suction – just like the sound that we can make with our tongue and palate. (So she’s not doing anything so crude as banging her mandibles together – she’s actually speaking Xhosa.)

Most notably, she now has a proper five-part hoot: ‘
Hooo!
… (three to five seconds’ pause)… hoo, hoo-hoo
HOOO
!’, in a descending tremolo. [I have since read that a bird species’ characteristic call or song is partly a genetic inheritance and partly learned by imitation, so Mumble must to some degree have copied her hooting from wild owls that she could hear calling in the distance, though I couldn’t.] She also has a sharply bitten-off ‘kee-
wikk
!’, which sounds to my vulgar human ears like a rude Anglo-Saxon expletive. I heard her doing several of these in her night cage recently, about thirty minutes after lights out. Sometimes she also joins briefly in the dawn chorus at about 5am – just half a dozen hoots, then silence.

* * *

From our first days together, Mumble’s method of launching herself from the top edge of the living-room door when I walked past was always impressive. Without stretching from her ball-of-fluff pose, she would simply lean
forwards and roll confidently off into space, hardly opening her wings as she dropped to my shoulder, and landing with a little squeak. Given my own brief and painfully incompetent flirtation with parachuting a couple of years previously, I was deeply envious of both her equipment and her technique. Naturally, as the weeks passed I sought every opportunity to watch her practising her flying. This learning process took time, and since she lacked the luxury of an instructor with dual controls to keep her out of trouble until she was ready to go solo, the weeks while she still had her L-plates up were not without incident.

Take-offs and point-to-point flights came easily. From a solid perch, she sprang into the air by the power of her flexed legs, gave one downstroke of her spreading wings, and immediately achieved flying speed. The large size of her wings compared to her weight gave her a light wing-loading, and thus effortlessly buoyant flight. (Owls have only about one-third the wing-loading of, say, a duck, which has to flap its wings frantically while charging down a long runway for take-off.) When she was accelerating, her individual wing movements were too fast for my eyes to isolate, but stop-frame photography of tawnies has shown me that the long, finger-like primary feathers at the wingtips curl forwards at the ends of the up- and down-strokes, making crescent patterns in the air. The broad, yard-long spread of her wings made her body look like a small, perfectly horizontal nacelle, with her head streamlined face-forwards into the shape of it by her ruff of neck feathers. Her tail was furled into a single spike when she
first took off, but then spread out into a rounded fan. Her undercarriage was retracted, with lower legs bent up parallel to her belly, feet almost invisible against the feathers and claws neatly folded in under her toes.

Nevertheless, despite Mumble’s elegant mastery of most phases of flight by her first autumn, it was a while longer before her landings reliably improved beyond the frankly lamentable. She was fine when she flew up to a perch at an angle from below, but controlling any kind of downward swoop seemed beyond her. The problem was clearly the difficulty of co-ordinating the transition from horizontal to vertical movement (exactly like a novice RAF pilot mastering the tricky technique of landing a vectored-thrust Hawker Harrier ‘jump jet’). Until she got the hang of this, she usually flew full tilt at the objective – her tray-perch, the back of a chair, a table lamp – and smashed into it, sometimes rocking it with the impact and giving a little winded squeak.

Her incompetence was most obvious when she forgot (as she often did) her previous experiences of ‘ice landings’ on the long marble coffee table. She made her final approach far too fast and at far too shallow an angle, and when she touched down she simply skidded across it with her feet flailing vainly for traction, her wings beating wildly, and her tail fanning out awkwardly in all directions. Invariably she would disappear off the far side in an ungainly cartwheel of feathers, like some broken ornithopter in a jerky early-1900s newsreel.

One day she added a refinement to this routine,
attempting a lengthways landing while a roll of paper towels was lying on the near end of the flight deck. Apparently expecting this to be solidly fixed, she smacked straight into it, talons first. Naturally, under the impact of about a pound of fast-moving owl it began to roll along the table, unreeling as it went. Mumble found herself frantically flapping and back-pedalling on top of it, riding the ever-diminishing cylinder like a lumberjack on a rolling log until both of them fell off the end of the table. She seemed to find my helpless laughter irritating (one can take umbrage so much more convincingly when one has a lot of feathers).