My Natural History

by Simon Barnes

  So we sat. We sat, gazing out at the small patch of wood that lay beyond the sealed windows. It was – and I had plenty of time to think about this – a place odd to human eyes, one where no paths exist, which has no human logic, which a human can only cross with a scramble and a fall and stinging. Even a scrap of English woodland is wilder than we know. Below us, in the voluptuously diggable earth, we could see the great ramparts of a badger’s palace: a grand project that had continued for years from one generation to the next, a great narrative told in friable earth. And the light faded and we saw the odd bunny, and once a rat. We heard the sudden scream of a jay. We ate sandwiches. I drank a can of beer, Joe drank a bottle of water. We exchanged a couple of remarks in whispers. A joke, a muffled laugh. Occasionally I shifted position, or Joe did. The light was almost gone. There was a rather perfunctory dusk chorus. I was beginning to prepare in my mind the right sort of thing to say: well, that’s wild animals for you. They’re not tame, you know. That’s the point, eh? We’ll try another time, but there it is, we’ll put this one down to experience. Sorry it’s been a bit of a disappointment, but hey, that’s wildlife. Hoping that even after this wasted evening, he’d give the wild another chance.

  It’s a big thing for a teenage boy to sit in silence and stillness for three hours. It’s a big thing for a teenager to have anything at all to do with the wild, for the years of adolescence are a time – there is even research to prove it – when you are at your least responsive to the non-human world. The need to establish a social identity and a personal view of life takes up all your energy. For most people, the years of your teens are the lost years of the wild: the years when tamelife dominates everything that you do, to the exclusion of things even slightly wild.

  Come, I thought. We’ll give it another 15 minutes. I glanced over to Joe. He won’t be able to take much more, I thought. And then, like an angel appearing in answer to a prayer, a big stripy nose emerged from the earth: a creature as improbable as any I have seen in my life. The badger that appeared in front of us looked almost absurdly like Mr Badger of The Wind in the Willows. It is when I see a badger that I am most conscious of the inseparable nature of the wild world and the world of the imagination.

  A second badger appeared, and then a third. We could hear them snuffling, for badgers are great snufflers, as they hoovered up peanuts in the most tremendous hurry, as if the long wait after the roaring of the engine had given them an appetite. The pear-shaped bodies, the immensely powerful back end, the corpulent grace, a little like that of sumo wrestlers: these are creatures made for the earth. It was now almost dark, but our long staring had given us our night vision, and we could make out the badgers from the flashing of the white on their faces, so dazzlingly set off by the black stripes. Is that what the stripes are for: for nocturnal signalling? And then they vanished, each one in a different direction, foraging, munching, revelling in the night, the dark: each one knowing that he had the sett and each other to return to. A badger is a very secure animal: top predator, a full social life, and everything based around the monumental diggings, the great underground castles.

  So we left, taking our rubbish, locking up, leaving the key and the empty peanut pot in the right place, and returned home. “Sorry we had such a long wait.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “I thought they wouldn’t come.”

  “I thought they probably would.”

  “I was getting a speech ready about… Never mind, that’s wildlife.”

  “Why?”

  23. Barn owl

  Tyto alba

  When I was ten I won a Highly Commended certificate in a poetry competition that involved, I think, the entire borough of Wandsworth, or at least, the primary schools therein. It was the peak of my achievement as a poet, though I carried on gamely for another dozen years.

  His eyesight keen

  Scans round the green

  The owl is out to kill

  The vermin take cover

  At his deadly hover

  The owl is out to kill

  A careless rat wanders astray

  The owl is down without delay

  The owl has got his kill

  I think we can all agree that Highly Commended was generous in the circumstances. But I include these all-too-mortal lines as proof that the barn owl had always haunted me.

  It is almost the literal truth: for barn owls are ghost-birds, wraith-birds, spook-owls, traditionally associated with fading light, pale birds with baby faces that come into being with the gathering dark, crossing the countryside on soundless wings, living in abandoned dwellings; birds with a taste for ruins, whose un-bird-like, un-man-like, un-living-thing-like screech signals the arrival of the night and the time of fear.

  Barn owls were my passion. I knew I would never see one, any more than I would see a unicorn, but the haunting of my imagination was as meaningful to me as the haunting of any buildings. There was a photograph that helped a great deal with the haunting process.

  It was, like the marsh harrier picture mentioned earlier, taken by the great primordial bird photographer Eric Hosking, a man who was to lose his eye to an owl that resented his presence, though this was a tawny, not a barn. Hosking called his autobiography An Eye For A Bird.

  The image, captured in 1934, became a classic: a flat white human face, sphinx-like, Buddha-like, as wise or as sinister as human imagination could make it, carrying in its beak a careless rat; or, to be more accurate, a careless short-tailed field vole. The face human, the wings angelic, the appetite bestial: what more does the imagination need to feed on?

  But for me, barn owls were never sinister. I rather prided myself on that. They were part of the natural world, and if they made a spooky call, that was not because barn owls were spooks but because humans tended to get spooked. If the life of a barn owl is alien to our own, then it is the more to be cherished. For me, the fascination of barn owls lay not in their supernatural possibilities, in an anthropomorphic understanding of their natures, in fear, in superstition, in anything at all to do with imposed human ideas: no, my imagination was fired by the thought of these pale silent killers leading their serious lives remote from human understanding.

  At one stage of my childhood, I designed my own coat of arms. I had a brief craze on heraldry and learned all the magic words and some of the magical meaning of the bend or baton sinister, the stag trippant attired, the eagle displayed, the lion rampant gules. I prepared my escutcheon with some care, ready for the day when I was given a knighthood by an admiring monarch: argent, a fess gules, in chief three barn owl heads proper. Barn owls for their beauty, barn owls for my imagination, barn owls for Barnes. I never thought I’d ever see a real one.

  When I returned from my time in Asia and started going to places richer in possibilities than Streatham Common, I made a number of jaunts with my friend Tim, a decent birder who took me to some fine places just a short train ride from London. “What will we see, Tim?” “Oh, chance of black tern on the reservoir, maybe golden plover on the moor, don’t think it’s cold enough for smew… short-eared owl is almost definite… big wader numbers… diving duck… and turning home, we might pick up a barn owl in the dusk.”

  Oh yes, might pick up a unicorn, might pick up a hippogriff, might bump into a sphinx and get asked the odd riddle. Might meet the creature of my dreams, might meet the creature that, above all others, haunted the imagination of my childhood, might meet the most beautiful, most impossible creature that ever took wing. But we never did.

  When I was researching my Minsmere book, I had been told that barn owls were frequently to be seen above the Minsmere Levels: that if I looked out across the water from Island Mere Hide at dusk, I would almost certainly see one. And so I looked. Again and again, and for extended periods, I stared across the lovely lake, trying to coax a fleck of white into the greying sky. Impossibly distant, looking beyond the ducks and the swans, staring at a place too far for intimacy. Still, just a glimpse, just a brief appear
ance of a distant pale bird would be a start. Eventually, I was granted just that: yes, a white bird; yes, on arched wings; yes, unquestionably a barn owl. Not because I could recognise it, but because it could not be anything else: it was a negative encounter, though not without its beauty. It wasn’t a sighting that brought me knowledge or understanding: just a rather piquant detail on a lovely painting: a pale wash of sky with a still paler brushstroke: on a field argent an owl argent, tantalising, teasing, thrilling enough in its way: it was a sight that increased the appetite rather than satisfied it.

  Cind and I spent a good deal of time in Suffolk while I was researching the book, and when I had finished, Suffolk refused to let us go. There were elements of a homecoming for Cind, though it was a home she had never lived in: the barge-sailing side of her family comes from the Shotley peninsular. The Suffolk coast is something of an acquired taste: the bleakness, even in summer, can be disturbing, and it is marked by strange patches which are certainly not the sea, but are not entirely land either. But Suffolk became our place.

  It was just after Christmas, and we had decided to take a few bracing days of big skies and winter waders, walks and pub meals, whisky by the fire and giggling runs into icy sheets.

  We took a walk in the afternoon around the Alde estuary: a place of casual immensities and the same pearly light that you get in Venice. No coincidence: it’s the light of brackish lagoons, but here, instead of Tintoretto and Carpaccio, we had avocets and marsh harrier. Reeds like a field of corn, sabled water, argent sky. And a miracle.

  There before us, just a few yards away, like the richest gift ever bestowed, a barn owl. A barn owl proper. He was working the rough land beneath a grove of recently planted trees, perched on a pink square tree-guard and gravely surveying the rank grass beneath. We watched as he flew to another. And another. It was as if we had been given the gift not only of barn owl but of invisibility. Occasionally he dropped onto the grass. Silent, always silent, for the wings of an owl are muffled with feathers. This is not just so that the prey animals can’t hear him coming: it also means that his hearing has no interference. A barn owl locates his prey by listening: the sound of his own progress would spoil that. His ears are placed asymmetrically so that he can get a cross-bearing: he can plunge with confidence onto a field vole he has never seen. It’s not his eyesight keen that matters after all: it’s his ear-hearing keen. His earsight, perhaps. No wonder I was only Highly Commended.

  We watched the owl until dusk fell, for getting on for an hour, agog, almost bewildered by the sense of privilege. Then we went back to our rented cottage, knowing that Suffolk had, with this transcendental vision of the barn owl, established an eternal claim over us. We would be back here as often as we could, despite all the things that kept us anchored to the rim of London.

  Five or six years later, our house was the epicentre of an owl chorus such as I had never heard before. It was early autumn, a time of great movements. Young owls, parted from their parents, go out to seek their fortunes: sometimes they attempt to invade a place already taken. They make enquiries: these are answered, often with great force. All these matters are discussed in sound. On this night, all these autumnal quests and movements and challenges seemed to happen at once. The excitement they generated stimulated every owl within hearing distance – within earsight, perhaps – no matter what his species. It was cold, but we opened all the windows of the downstairs room we were in, leaning out to try and establish number and direction, to make some kind of sense of this barrage of sound. The nearest I could come up with was seven or eight little owls, four or five barn owls and two or three tawnies. The little owls yelped. The tawnies alternated their own sounds, the wavering hoot of horror films and the sharp, dissyllabic contact call. And every so often, the barn owls gave out that extraordinary hissing roar.

  We had only just moved in. For all I knew we would hear this wild chorus every year, perhaps every night in season. But no: it was a one-off: a strange coincidence of birds and night and excitement. Harry Potter had not been written, and Joe, then only three, was yet to fall under his spells, but it was a little like being in Privet Drive in the opening pages of the first book. Owls beyond computation: what message did they carry for us?

  For now, we had moved to Suffolk and I learned almost at once that we were now in the land of the barn owl. I began to live with barn owls in terms of casual intimacy. Birds that had been fantastical creatures, mythical beings given life by my imagination, were now daily companions. I saw barn owls when walking the dog, first when she was a puppy prone to wild runs and flopping falls, now when she is a dignified old lady with an increasing taste for short cuts. I saw barn owls when I went looking for other birds. I saw barn owls when I worked with my horses. I saw barn owls from the windows of the house. I was able to recognise them from the smallest clue: a distant pale shape following the line of a hedge: a half-glimpse of the effortful, floppy wing: the somehow immensely satisfying moment when a barn owl perches, closes its pale wings and disappears, its brown mantle blending instantly with the background. The sound of their presence was always with us. They were not so frequent as to be unremarkable: they were not so infrequent as to be a surprise. They were there as a permanent validation, if you like, a proof that my imagination and the real wild world had achieved some kind of unity.

  There is a barn owl box in a big oak a short way behind the house. Barn owls have roosted there. Stock doves have also bred there instead: and here, you have to put on a serious face and explain that stock doves, being amber-listed worldwide, are in greater danger than barn owls and are therefore More Important. I can’t say that I wouldn’t prefer a family of barn owls: still, the place is there if they ever need it. Barn owls have also roosted in my barn, and left their horribly turd-like pellets on the floor.

  They are on the increase in this part of Suffolk, because farmers are increasingly inclined (and subsidised) to leave areas of rough grassland where an owl can hunt for careless, short-tailed field voles, and also because the Suffolk Wildlife Trust has gone to some trouble to persuade landowners to put up barn owl boxes. With the destruction of old barns and tumbledown outbuildings, the owls have become homeless. Hollow trees that they would annex in a world without humans tend to be cut down impatiently, though two or three fields away, there is just such a tree, a venerable oak, and though the farmer has been itching for his power-saw for years, his wife won’t let him touch it. And it generally has barn owls within. There is a change taking place in the way the world understands barn owls: they were once seen as spooks and evil omens, then they were (wrongly) cast as pheasant-eating villains, but now they are admired, desired and prestigious.

  Barn owls define our Suffolk lives. Joe has been familiar with them since he was at nursery school. Eddie can recognise them: he can sign them, making Biggles-goggles with his fingers, and say “barn owl” distinctly. Important words to master, I think.

  Here, Cind and I have known joys and suffered sadness. Here, Joe and Eddie have done and are doing their growing up. Outside, there’s lots and lots of Suffolk: and every so often, a barn owl. If you miss one, there’ll be another along soon enough, like the 49 bus that used to take me from Streatham to the Natural History Museum. I have written a lot of words in this house, pausing often to look away from my desk and out of the window. It’s not the best vantage point of the house, and barn owls are unusual at my desk, rather like inspiration. Like a barn owl, it best comes unexpected, the better to be treasured. My tamelife has always been punctuated and illustrated and spelt and narrated by my wildlife; these days there are times when the two things have at last become indistinguishable.

  Copyright

  First published in 2010

  by Short Books

  3A Exmouth House

  Pine Street

  London EC1R 0JH

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  All rights reserved

  © SIMON BARNES

  The right of Simon Barnes to be
identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–1–907595–790