I was reared in the dying decades of that punitive sporting tradition. For many country people, shooting was a lifelong passion, as were fox-, stag- and otter-hunting. I spent the years from when I could first run wild, perhaps six or seven – long before I had a gun – until my late teens, happily wandering through woods and fields watching animals being killed or, later, chasing and killing them myself. The rules were straightforward and unchallenged, a country apartheid every bit as uncompromising and odious as its human counterpart. With the exception of small birds, wildlife was either game or vermin, white or black, as stark and uncompromising as that.
And yet, curiously and counter-intuitively, it was also both traditional and fashionable for country people, particularly those with leisure time to fill, folk who would then have described themselves as gentry, to study natural history. Many were serious, and seriously good amateur naturalists. Immaculately arranged collections of birds’ eggs, butterflies, beetles and pressed flowers were commonplace, even the norm – and there were rules: an intriguing code of moral and ethical standards by which you operated your collections.
Never take more than one egg from a nest; only one rare orchid to be pressed. Never attempt to pin out your butterfly, moth or your beetle until you were quite sure it was dead in the killing bottle. As children we were taught how to fold and crush laurel leaves with a rolling pin and place them in the killing jar. Their aromatic vapours overpowered the butterflies quickly, but the beetles took much longer. If you removed them too quickly they came back to life. I am still troubled by the image of a stag beetle going nowhere, swimming on a pin hours after I had impaled it.
The library shelves in my childhood home contained many exquisitely illustrated volumes of bird books, wild flower guides, encyclopaedias of natural history, guides to butterflies and moths, fungi, and even one I remember on injurious insects – stinging and biting flies and wasps. They were old and foxed and smelt fusty, but the illustrations were often protected by thin veils of tissue, to be lifted carefully aside so that the delicate watercolour prints were revealed in their full glory. It was from these precious early tomes that I garnered so much inspiration to discover wild nature for myself.
Not until much later did it dawn on me that the paradox of killing the things you admired so much that you wanted to keep them was one of the perplexing contradictions of serious nature study of the day. This, coupled with obsessive and lyrical adulation of game species in art, prose, poetry and taxidermy, while lustily chasing otters, foxes, deer and hares and wilfully exhorting the extermination of most hooked beaks and carnivores, seemed at the time entirely rational and unremarkable. The two omissions from the list were rabbits and badgers. Rabbits were widely shot, trapped, netted and snared by all country people and formed a staple in their diet, and badger digging and baiting was a pastime – a sport, even – and the common preserve of village boys with time on their hands.
There was no excuse. It is no good trying to blame the confused standards of the times or my upbringing. I knew that my grandfather loved birds. He knew not only his robins from his wrens, but also his redpolls from his redwings, and his notes scribbled in pencil in the margins of some of those books are testament to where he had seen them, and to his lifelong interest in all country things. I also knew very well that having an owl in that old yew was a joy to him; it was a symbol of continuity, of English village country life going on as it had done for many centuries. That much had been made endearingly clear to me from his tone. The three of them had seemed to me to fit together in an ageless trinity of absolute belonging. He loved the tree for its antiquity and its long association with owls and he loved the owl for the refinement with which its occupation graced the tree. He certainly knew that tawny owls did no harm to anyone. For all his exploits with the gun, I am sure he never shot an owl; nor would he have condoned it by a gamekeeper, far less his grandson.
The head-hanging truth that still torments my soul is that when no one was looking I crept out and shot that owl. For a moment it seemed not to move; then it tipped forward and fell like a rag at my feet. I picked it up, hot and floppy in my hands. Its cinnamon and cream mottled plumage was as soft and silky as Angora fleece. One owl, one boy, one gun. Two burst hearts, one with lead, the other with guilt. I had never held a tawny owl before and its lifeless beauty hit me in a withering avalanche of instantaneous remorse and shame. I have never forgotten it and never forgiven myself.
To this day I ask myself why I did it. Was it the raw, puerile stupidity of vandalism, or did some uninvited surge of prepubescent carnal machismo wade in and take over, blinding what little formative judgement I possessed? I don’t know; but I do know that it was to become one of the definitive climacterics of my adolescence. At that moment something indefinable inside me changed, like a pupal case splitting open to reveal the real insect. It wasn’t just shame: it was a deeper, purer catharsis, like snapping out of hypnosis and awaking to see the real world around me for the first time.
I hid the corpse under leaves deep in a thicket and never told a soul. But, like Lady Macbeth’s damned spot, the image of the dead owl in my hand refused to go away. It haunted me then and it haunts me still. Although I went on to enjoy game shooting as a social convention for many years, from that day forward, in the hope that it might assuage my guilt, I adhered to the sporting doctrine of ‘A Father’s Advice’ with the purity of the Absolute.
Later, in my teens, I reared tawny owlets that had been gusted prematurely from their nests while in the flightless, fluffy-tennis-ball stage. I have forgotten how many, but certainly five or six over as many years. I loved them all, but releasing them successfully to the wild became a passionate plea for absolution and atonement, an expiation demanded by the immortal owl within. It may also be that that one event, that single dead owl in my hand, conspired to bring about two important changes in my life, the second maturing from the first: one, that I determined to know and understand as much about nature as I could; and two, that in the fullness of maturity, I would become a lifelong, committed nature conservationist.
* * *
I still can’t be trusted with owls. Not that any of the four species we have around us at Aigas need fear. It’s just that I can’t be trusted to pass them by. They are more likely to get to know me as the shadowy figure with binoculars round his neck standing unobtrusively under a tree in the hope of witnessing the silken mystery of their mesmerising flight. My problem is that I have come to identify with them so powerfully that I can no longer deny them or even the thought of them. If I see an owl I have to abandon what I’m doing and all my attention is sapped until it’s gone. If I find one dead at the roadside I suffer the leaden-winged burden of doom.
We have the ubiquitous tawnies with us all the time. We hear their hooting and shrieking calls, and delight in their silent, wafting glides from tree to tree. It is one of the moonlit nocturnes of winter at Aigas that I look forward to every year.
In a pause between gales the full moon arose, still, stark, and as pale as a white peach. In the small hours of that cool February morning I lay and watched the mercurial light slide silently across the bedroom ceiling. Tawny owls were calling in the woods below the loch. They seemed to be responding to the brilliance of the moon.
I was drowsily building a mental picture of them clashing over territorial claims in the run-up to mating when one bird came close; it must have flown soundlessly to the big ash tree that stands at the south-west corner of the house, only twenty yards from my bedroom window. It hooted so loudly and so unexpectedly that I started and was instantly wide awake. I jumped out of bed and stood at the casement staring out into the monochrome night.
Another long, wavering note, round and wooden and cavernous, pitched somewhere between an oboe and a bassoon, primed the night air with a strangely disturbing metaphysical quality of wildness. I followed the sound and, to my delight, on the edge of a lattice of naked ash branches the owl was immaculately silhouetted against the mo
on; a small, compact oval like a Russian doll, perched on an outer branch on my side of the tree. Through the binoculars I keep at my bedside I could see it perfectly, even the moonshine reflected in its large round eyes as its head swivelled enquiringly from side to side. It called again, so distinct and direct that it seemed personal, a call to me alone, like a summons from another world. I could even see the mist of its hot breath. I determined to try to understand tawny calls.
* * *
Tawny owls have a variety of calls, but typically it is the ‘t-wit-t-woo’ of nursery rhymes that wrongly stereotypes them together. The ‘t-wit’ is more properly a harsh, penetrating two-syllabled ‘kvi-ik’, often repeated over and over again, and may signal communication as well as a challenge to would-be invaders, and the ‘t-woo’ is the long, wobbling, drawn out hoo-oo-oot it is so easy to mimic by blowing into your cupped hands. Both sexes are thought to be capable of making both calls, although the books will tell you that the males typically hoo-oot and the females kvi-ik.
Mike Thom, the British ornithologist who probably knows more about owls than anyone else alive, tells me that ‘While generally the male owl is the more vocal of the two sexes, advertising his territory, females often produce calls of their own and will sometimes “duet” with their mate. The familiar “hooo hu huhuhuhooo” call of the male, for example, is often answered by the female with a “keewik” contact call, this sometimes overlapping with the end note of the male’s call. Females sometimes produce a similar call to the male’s hoot, though it is higher in pitch, coarser in nature and with less precise phrasing.’
* * *
Somewhere out there, silent and secretive, is a pair of long-eared owls. We almost never see them. The western red cedars, planted in clumps 130 years ago and constantly spreading outwards by the furtive process of branches layering wherever they touch the ground, are now dark jungles of evergreen foliage on the outside, and impenetrable grottoes of dead branches and dark trunks looming up into the lofty canopy on the inside. They create perfect asylums for fell deeds and skulking beasts. A young male badger recently took up residence in a shallow dugout under the buttress roots of one massive stem. He had probably been ousted from his clan by a more dominant male and found a temporary home for himself under our trees. Roe deer sometimes lie up in these thickets, and pine martens and foxes slink in there to devour their filched chickens.
High above them, silently watching from a lofty perch, are the long-eared owls. This beautiful owl, with feather tufts (which aren’t ears at all), like extended eyebrows, reaching an inch above its head, is one of my problem birds. Every spring I search for them and mostly I fail to find them, although I do occasionally hear their deep, booming calls in the dead of night. In recent years I have seen only one, killed by a peregrine or a goshawk, stripped bare to the breast keel, lying on its back with spread wings on the heather moor. Whenever I have found their nest in the past it has always been because I have tracked down the unmistakable ‘squeaking-gate’ calls of the young. It is thought that they are universally in decline in the UK because of competition by tawnies. I haven’t found a nest for a few years now and if I don’t find another soon I shall begin to worry that ours have also been squeezed out.
Their diurnal cousin of the same genus, Asio, the short-eared owl, with barely visible ‘ear’ tufts, but which might better be called the long-winged owl (it has the longest wings of any British owl), is much easier to see. It wafts along the riverbank and across the marshes with slow, rowing down-beats, wavering glides and side-slips, more like a harrier than an owl. I used to see them regularly from my study window, a sight that always brought me to my feet, whatever I was doing, and still does, but less often now that agriculture has purified the pastures with Italian rye grass leys and the irrepressible craze for silage, so devastating to partridges, corncrakes, corn buntings and lapwings, as well as an unsung and unknown host of invertebrates. Even the once ubiquitous yellowhammers have given up and gone away.
It is a very confiding owl. If I stand still at the field edge it will hunt right up to and past me, sometimes perching on a fence post to quiz me from bright yellow eyes set in a bulging disc, giving it a slightly foolish look with an unnerving, baleful expression. Grouse-moor owners and their keepers confuse this bird with the hen harrier for being a grouse-chick predator, which it probably only rarely is, although it does favour heather moorland. Its breeding success depends entirely on the abundance of voles. There is no doubt that both species are still quietly removed by keepers, an illegal persecution it is extremely difficult to prove or to stop.
That leaves the barn owl, sometimes called the screech owl, one of the world’s most numerous and successful owl species. Viewed globally and numerically, the barn owl is a bird of the tropics and sub-tropics, much aided by the presence of people, with whom there seems to have been a close association for uncounted thousands of years. Wherever we go rodents follow: rats, mice and voles in particular. Barn owls are principally rodent predators, although they are capable of catching a much wider variety of prey. The consequence of our rodent followers is that barn owls have moved in too: church belfries, ruins, cow sheds and, of course, barns. We are lucky to have them at Aigas: we are close to the most northerly reaches of their range.
Ours have chosen to nest in an entirely natural site, a rock hole in the face of the disused quarry a mile away, and they hunt the river fields at dusk. I know of no bird whose ghostly presence engages with the human spirit as profoundly and vividly as that of the barn owl. The freckled golden mantle, the heart-shaped face, the dark, penetrating eyes and the luminous white under-wings as it floats silently through the dusk, all combine to give this hauntingly beautiful creature an ethereal, almost mystical quality that can be both disturbing and unforgettable.
My association with barn owls began not long after I shot the tawny, but mercifully unburdened by guilt. I found one in an old red-brick barn in the middle of a corn field. It was sick and I never knew why. When I approached it on the barn floor it made no attempt to fly or move away. It appeared unharmed but was thin and listless. I took it home and tried to feed it with strips of raw meat. It was the time when the agricultural world was rejoicing at the ‘miracle’ of the DDT pesticide. I suspect it was a victim of secondary poisoning. It died that night.
Faced with a corpse, I examined it carefully. Snowy white belly and underwings; golden mottled mantle, back and tops to the wings; snow-white face fringed in a filigree of tiny gold feathers; large, forward-facing eyes as black and shiny as wet coal; long white legs and scimitar talons sharper than fish-hooks; a short, button-hook bill with whiskery white feathers peaked forward between the eyes, like a nose. And those wing feathers. I had read about the silent flight of owls and now I could see why. The edge of each feather was gossamer thin and as fine and soft as thistledown. I was entranced.
It so happened that an aged schoolmaster cousin had recently visited my parents and brought some cured duck skins to show me. ‘It’s easy,’ he assured me, handing over an extremely sad-looking gadwall that appeared to have been run over. ‘Once you’ve skinned it, treat it with borax and dry it thoroughly. It will keep for ever.’ I did as he instructed with my owl and it seemed to work. It lived carefully folded in tissue paper in a box in my bedroom along with many other natural-history trophies. But he had failed to warn me about feather mites and that all museum collections treated their skins with an arsenic paste. One day a year later I opened the box to find my barn owl in tatters. I was aghast. Most of it had been consumed, shredded to dust by these silent, unseen vandals. I wrote off my first attempt at preserving a bird skin as a disaster; I would not make the same mistake again. But its magic had worked. I had held a barn owl in my hands and knew its startling beauty in life and in death.
* * *
Nature writers are supposed to be able to summon from the literary ether the precise words to describe their subjects or the feelings they evince. Sometimes the Mu
se attends, but by no means on demand. It is one of the great delights of trying to be a writer that words can suddenly appear, like the blackcap’s jubilant song, absent for months and then unexpectedly and ecstatically there, winging into your head just when you need them most. The more emotive the subject or the more deeply personal the experience, the easier it ought to be. But not necessarily so. Some experiences transcend ready description as though making a point: words – at least those available to the generality of writers – sometimes fall hopelessly short; they dish out despair in bucket loads. Others fare much better.
John Alec Baker, the shy, almost reclusive 1960s author of The Peregrine and The Hill of Summer, is often cited as the modern gold standard for lyrical nature writing. I know of very few naturalists and nature writers of my generation who have not been influenced by his work. I freely own up to that. Not only have I never viewed nature writing in the same light after reading him, but I have never viewed a peregrine falcon without his luminous descriptions zooming in and taking over. Of a short-eared owl he wrote:
Heavy clouds lowered, and the afternoon was dull. Mustard yellow in the dusky light, a short-eared owl rose silently from a ditch, floated up like a buoyant moon, with no sound but the soft rustle of the parting grass. Turning its cat-like face towards me, it flexed its mottled snakeskin wings across the marsh.
And so it is that I have struggled to find the right words to do justice to the barn owl and its flight, something I have so often seen, that has been with me since boyhood, but which never fails to stop me dead in my tracks, make me hold my breath. I believe it is one of those experiences one has to witness to understand properly. It’s personal. Unashamedly, I went searching for help.
First I turned to some of the ‘greats’ of twentieth-century ornithology. Messrs Witherby, Jourdain, Ticehurst and Tucker’s Handbook of British Birds, first published in 1942, which would become the standard work for the following thirty-five years and was the first bird reference book I knew well. One of my earliest memories is of my father poring over its five volumes. They say of the white-breasted barn owl (there are at least two distinct races):
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