Owl

by Desmond Morris

  Morris Graves, Little Known Bird of the Inner Eye, 1941, gouache.

  Self-taught artists known as Modern Primitives, Sunday painters or Outsider artists have from time to time produced an owl to remember. In England the wonderfully idiosyncratic artist Fred Aris (b. 1932), who used to run a café in south London but who now paints full time, has produced his own unique version of the famous Owl and the Pussycat. Far out at sea a huge ginger tabby lies in the prow of a small rowing boat while the owl sits stiffly erect in the stern, with a guitar strapped on its back. Both these nocturnal predators look suitably despondent to find themselves in such an inappropriate environment, but they seem to have accepted their lot. It is too far for the cat to swim ashore and the owl cannot fly home because of the weight of the guitar, so there they sit, patiently fulfilling the demands of Mr Lear’s nonsense verse.18

  Tom Duimstra (‘tom d’), Two Owls and Bird, after 2000, acrylic and collage on cardboard.

  In the United States, the increasingly well-known Outsider artist Tom Duimstra (b. c. 1952), who always signs himself simply as ‘tom d’, has a special fondness for owls. Tom, who hails from Grand Rapids, Michigan, has become the favourite folk artist of many American celebrities, such as actress Susan Sarandon, singer Courtney Love and author Tom Robbins, who have started collecting his work. He has exhibited with Andy Warhol in Holland and his owls have a splendidly primitive quality. Once seen, they are hard to forget.

  The Owl House archway by Helen Martins at Nieu Bethesda, South Africa.

  In South Africa an outsider art masterpiece exists at the remote village of Nieu Bethesda. Called The Owl House it represents a lifetime’s labour of love on the part of an eccentric recluse by the name of Helen Martins (1897–1976). Helen was born in the village but left to become a teacher. Married and divorced, she returned to her birthplace in the late 1920s to care for her elderly parents. When they died she found herself, in her late forties, alone and isolated. Unpopular with the other residents she hid herself away more and more. To put some colour into her grey world, she decided to transform her Karoo house into a monumental work of art.

  The house, its walls encrusted with crushed glass, luminous paint, multi-coloured panes and angled mirrors reflecting the many candles that burned there, created a world of fantasy. Outside, she surrounded the building with hundreds of strange models and large sculptured figures of mythical beasts. The arched entrance way from the street was watched over by a stoic, double-faced owl. The whole project became an obsession that continued until, at the age of 78, she killed herself by drinking caustic soda. Today, The Owl House is a tourist attraction open to visitors, who are startled by the surreal world she built there over many years, dominated by statues of huge owls with their wings spread wide, as if about to launch themselves down onto the human heads below. The house was declared a national monument in 1991.

  Finally, the latest well-known figure to give us an interesting image of an owl is the notorious British artist Tracey Emin (b. 1963). Tracey, widely ridiculed for presenting her unmade bed to the Tate as an art exhibit, is a far more serious artist than the tabloids would have us believe. She is also, despite her infamously explicit presentation of her busy sex life, a complex individual whose celebrity lifestyle appears to be an attempt to conceal her true personality. It is in her small etching of an owl, however, that the truth, perhaps unintentionally, emerges. The clue is in the title: Little Owl – Self-portrait. The owl in question is shown to us very alone, sitting rather dishevelled and forlorn, in the crook of a tree. Apart from that, the scene is completely empty. In nature the owl is a solitary bird and Emin’s owl is as lonely as they come. If this is how she sees herself, then she has yet to find the kind of fulfilment that one senses she craves. As with so many other artists, the owl to her is more than an owl, it is a symbol or metaphor of some sort, and here the message appears to be that the owl stands for being alone.

  Tracey Emin, Little Owl – Self-portrait, 2005, etching.

  It would be possible to track down hundreds more works of art depicting owls. Clearly, for artists everywhere, owls are a visual gift. Even artists who rarely draw or paint other kinds of birds occasionally find it impossible to resist outlining those huge eyes and that wonderfully rounded head. Because of the rich mythological history of the owl image, it is tempting to seek a symbolic interpretation of every painted owl we see, but that would be a mistake. For many artists the owl is simply a beautiful shape to be relished for its own sake, with no legendary or deep psychological undertones. For some, symbolism may be important, but for others we may be better served ignoring the sometimes ludicrously convoluted interpretations of art historians and accept that, as Gertrude Stein might have said, an owl is an owl is an owl . . .

  9 Typical Owls

  Having examined all the many ways in which human beings have viewed or interacted with owls over the centuries, it remains to ask the question: what is the scientific truth about these remarkable birds? How many of the old tales about owls are based on reality and how many are wild distortions or romantic exaggerations? A great deal of research has been done on the owl family in recent years and we now have a clear picture of what makes a typical owl and how many unusual variations there are.

  All owls are predators and the vast majority of owl species are active only at night. A few species, like the snowy owl that inhabits the cold Arctic regions, have however adapted to daytime hunting. Owls have wonderful vision, amazing hearing and a characteristic, broad-headed silhouette that makes them immediately recognizable. A owl is an owl and there are no half-measures. There are no intermediate forms that cause arguments as to whether a particular bird is, or is not, an owl.

  The majority of owls have the great advantage, for a predator, of silent flight, although a few species have abandoned this feature and now have audible wing-beats like other birds. The typical owl also has a special foot design, called zygodactylous (literally, ‘paired toes’), in which there are two claws pointing forward and two back. Most other birds have three claws pointing forward and only one pointing back. In the snowy owl, the feet are well covered in feathers as a protection against the freezing ground.

  Snowy owl with feathered feet.

  Owl camouflage: African Scops owl resting on a camelthorn tree in Namibia.

  Socially, owls are rather solitary beings, hiding away by themselves, sleeping during the day, and hunting alone at night. With a few exceptions, they only come together in the breeding season. Burrowing owls are the only ones that break this rule on a regular basis, and can often be observed near their burrows in little groups of several families together. Despite their solitary nature, the English language does have a collective name for owls. A group of them is referred to as a parliament of owls. Whether they acquired this name because they are thought to be wise or because there is a belief that they are wicked is not clear.

  Some owls, if safe roosting places are scarce, may tolerate a few sleeping companions. Sleeping owls are vulnerable and their urge for privacy has to be weighed against their need for daytime security. If there happens to be a large and particularly attractive hollow tree in one spot and no other suitable roost anywhere near, a group of owls will use it together, not as an active social centre, but merely as a dormitory of convenience. If there are no suitable crevices for a sleeping owl, then it must make do with a high perch snug against a tree trunk. This is where the typical, speckled brown plumage of the owl becomes important, acting as camouflage against the bark of the tree. Some owls even manage to adopt a posture that makes them look like the extension of a tree stump, where they will remain motionless, with their eyes firmly closed and almost invisible to the casual passer-by.

  EYES

  The eyes of owls are remarkably big for their body size, the eyes of some species weighing as much as those of a human being. They also have a large exposed corneal surface, and are set wide apart. These are all special adaptations for life as a nocturnal bird of prey. The wide set of the e
yes in the skull, the feature that gives these birds their characteristic, broad-headed silhouette, helps to improve their stereoscopic vision, so important in catching their prey. They do, in fact, have the best stereoscopic vision of all birds.

  The frontally placed eyes of an owl are its most conspicuous feature, but an owl will never roll them at you or give you a side-long glance. This is because unlike human eyes those of an owl are fixed in their sockets. If an owl wants to look to one side it cannot turn its eyes but must turn its entire head. It is remarkably efficient at this manoeuvre, being able to rotate its head through 270 degrees and tilt it up and down through 90 degrees. This is possible because it has fourteen neck vertebrae, twice as many as a human being, giving it its remarkable neck flexibility.

  Most animals have spherical eyes, but owls do not. Instead of eyeballs they have tubular eyes. These remarkable eyes are held in place by bony sclerotic rings or scleral ossicles. It is this tubular shape that makes it impossible for the bird to rotate its eyes inside their sockets. It has sometimes been thought that this strange eye-shape has evolved as an aid to night vision, but the world’s greatest authority on animal eyes, Gordon Walls, states categorically that it ‘adds nothing to the capacity of the eye for operation in a dim light’.1 What it does do, however, is to enable the owl family to evolve large eyes without taking up too much head-space. If owls had huge spherical eyeballs, there would be little room left between them for their brains. The tubular shape of an owl’s eyes is concealed from us when we look at the adult bird, but with some owl chicks this strange feature is clearly visible when they are only a few weeks old, giving them the appearance of an alien being from another planet.

  A northern spotted owl with its head rotated to peer behind it.

  A four-week old Verraux’s eagle owl chick, showing the strange, tubular shape of the owl’s eye.

  Close-up of orange owl eyes.

  Grey owl with small pupils in bright light.

  Each eye possesses three eyelids, an upper, a lower and a nictitating one. The nictitating eyelid flashes diagonally across the eye’s corneal surface, cleaning it or protecting it. The owl is able to use these semi-transparent third eyelids singly or in unison. Nearly all owl species have bright yellow irises, making a conspicuous contrast with the central black spot of the pupil. In some species this yellow colour darkens to orange, or even further to brown, but when the owls are active at night these colour differences are irrelevant because the pupils then expand to fill the entire space with black.

  The owl’s eyes have two key tasks – to see in very dim light and to pick out the tiniest movement on the ground. These two requirements – visual sensitivity and visual acuity – are crucial to the owl’s survival as a nocturnal predator. It is no surprise therefore that they have excellent long-distance vision, although their ability to bring close-up objects into sharp focus is poor. Nor is it a surprise to learn that careful tests with barn owls proved that their visual sensitivity is at least 35 times better than that of humans.

  One of the great misconceptions about owls is that they cannot see in bright light. This supposed weakness has been the basis for legends and folktales for centuries, but it is simply not true. In fact, the majestic eagle owl has slightly better daytime vision than human beings. The pupils of owls can close right down to pin-pricks, through which a greatly reduced amount of sunlight is allowed to penetrate, enabling them to see even at noon.

  EARS

  Even with its wonderfully precise long-distance vision an owl may not always be able to see its prey. Its intended victim may be hidden below a carpet of leaves, for example, and the only clue to its position then will be the faint rustling sound it makes. This is where the owl’s highly sensitive hearing comes into play. Experiments with owls in the laboratory have shown that their sense of hearing is about ten times better than that of humans. Other tests have revealed that even in total darkness barn owls can detect and kill mice, providing that their victims are making some sort of rustling or squeaking noises.

  It must be stressed that the conspicuous ear-tufts of some owl species, that protrude like a pair of horns from the top of their heads, have nothing whatever to do with hearing. Their primary role is as a signalling device, indicating either the mood of an owl or the species to which it belongs. The true ears are always completely hidden in the feathers at the sides of the owl’s broad head. If, with a tame owl, these feathers are spread gently apart with the fingers, the extensive ear apertures beneath them are revealed. The remarkably advanced development of the ears of owls is not a new discovery. A diagram showing their complex structure beneath the head feathers was published as long ago as 1646 in the great Natural History of Aldrovandus.

  Exposed ear of an owl, from Ulysses Aldrovandus, Ornithologia, Book viii, from Opera Omnia (1656).

  In their most advanced form the ears of an owl are placed asymmetrically on the bird’s head, with one ear being higher than the other. The result of this is that minute sounds coming up from the ground below will arrive at one ear a fraction of a second earlier than at the other ear and so will be louder in one ear than the other. Also, if the prey is to the left of the spot where the bird is hovering, the sounds it makes as it rustles along through the foliage will reach the owl’s left ear before the right one, and vice versa. Astonishingly, in receiving these sounds owls are capable of detecting time differences of as little as 30 millionths of a second. It is hardly surprising that the region of the bird’s brain that is concerned with the reception of sounds is far more advanced in owls than in other birds. It is, for example, three times as complex as in the crow.

  Aiding this refined hearing process is the possession in most owls of a concave facial disc of tiny feathers. This disc acts like a radar dish, guiding sounds into the ears, and there are even special facial muscles that can alter the concavity of the dish, making it deeper or shallower as the bird hovers above its prey, assessing its precise position. Once it is certain of the victim’s location it makes its swift, silent swoop downwards, with its toes spread wide open ready to grasp the unsuspecting prey in a lethal grip. If the prey moves during this rapid descent the owl is capable of adjusting its flight path accordingly.

  In the 1960s some tests were carried out to discover which owls had the best hearing. The results showed that those species living in northern forests had better hearing than those from the tropics. This makes sense when one thinks of what it must be like to hunt at night in a northern pine forest, compared with a tropical rain forest. Midnight in a cold northern forest must be as silent as the grave, where even a mouse’s footstep could be heard by a hovering owl. Midnight in a tropical rain forest, on the other hand, with the night air filled with chirping insects and calling frogs, would be much too noisy for an owl to isolate a particular prey by its sounds alone. For tropical owls the half-light of dawn and dusk would inevitably become more important hunting times, when vision could play a bigger role in detecting their prey.

  HUNTING

  When out hunting at night the owl will hover for a while, watching and listening with its amazing eyes and ears. If it detects nothing, it will silently move on to a new spot and hover there. Once it has detected its prey it will swoop down until it is about 60 cm (2 feet) away and then swing its feet into a forward position with its toes spread out and its sharp claws poised for action. Then in a split second it pounces on its victim and clasps it tight, usually killing it instantly. If there is any resistance the powerful curved beak can be brought into play. At this point the owl usually flies off to a branch, carrying the corpse either in its claws or, if it is not too bulky, in its beak. Once it settles on the branch it proceeds to swallow its prey whole, usually taking several vigorous gulps to complete the process. Only on rare occasions when the victim happens to be unusually large will the owl start tearing it to pieces before swallowing it. Very small prey may sometimes be gobbled down without delay, right where they are caught.

  Some species of owls have shor
ter wings than others and this type generally prefer what is called perch-hunting. They take up a suitable position on a post or perch of some kind and sit there quietly waiting for a victim to stir in their vicinity. When this happens, they swoop down immediately and pounce. This less energetic form of hunting demands an environment where the pickings are easy.

  During the hunt it is important that the prey, who may also have sensitive ears, does not hear the owl coming. The eerie silence of the owl in flight has already been mentioned, but how this is achieved has not been explained. The secret is in the design of the flight feathers, the long primary pinions of the wings. In other birds these are stiff with a coarse surface and smooth edges, like the quill of a quill pen, but with owls they have delicately fringed, serrated edges and a soft velvety surface. These qualities decrease the sharpness of the air movement around the owl’s wings as they beat in the night air and dampen the swishing sound that one might expect to hear as a bird hovers or flies by. There is a cost in this refinement, however, because the softer wing feathers mean harder work for the hunting owl, but the huge advantage that silent flight brings to a stealthy predator makes the extra effort well worthwhile.

  A hunting barn owl hovering over a field.

  Owl with prey, from Ulysses Aldrovandus, Ornithologia, Book viii, from Opera Omnia (1656).