Owl Sense

by Miriam Darlington

  *

  June came upon us, the exams were over and it was time for my trip north with Jenny. I knew she might not tolerate me on many more of these forays, at least for a few years, and so wanted to make the most of her company. We packed our bags as lightly as possible, including wet-weather gear as well as swimwear, and boarded the Caledonian Sleeper in the balmy but thick city air of Euston station.

  As we lay tucked into our bunks I read about the chilling Scottish folklore surrounding owls. The word cailleach in Gaelic means old woman or hag, but caileach-oidhche means owl. It seems that the owl in Celtic culture was often associated with the crone – the cailleach literally means ‘the veiled one’. This was a magical old woman who possessed the elemental powers of nature and was able to conjure storms. The owl-crone embodied both wisdom and evil: a potent combination. Shakespeare tapped into such folk mythology in his Scottish play, Macbeth. ‘The howlet’s wing’ is plopped into the brew that the witches prepare on the stormy night at the start of the play to help to bring doom and destruction upon everyone. The scenes in the play when King Duncan is murdered are imbued with owl imagery. When Macbeth goes to murder him, Lady Macbeth excitedly imagines she hears a death messenger in the form of an owl:

  Hark! Peace!

  It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman,

  Which gives the stern’st good-night. He is about it.

  (II.ii.2–4)

  The owl’s threatening nature features immediately after the murder as well, when it is heard shrieking all night long:

  … the obscure bird

  Clamour’d the livelong night.

  (II.iii.60–61)

  The same morning other unnatural things have been happening:

  A falcon, towering in her pride of place,

  Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d.

  (II.iv.11–13)

  Here the normally nocturnal owl is shown to be turning the natural, God-given order of things upside down. The owl, an untameable bird of night and death, had come out in the day and murdered a falcon (representing the king) in broad daylight.

  In spite of the chilling reading, we slept deeply, rocked by the rhythm of the train. At 6 a.m. we awoke to a drizzly Glasgow dawn. Passing the monument to Sir Walter Scott I felt sure the great Scottish bard would have something to pass on about owls as he was a great gatherer of traditional tales and song, fascinated with medieval romance, ballads and ancient poetry, and was something of a cultural anthropologist of his time. Thanks to the 4G on Jenny’s iPhone I quickly found what I was looking for. In his ‘Ancient Gaelic Melody’, with a characteristic bouncing rhythm Scott demonstrates the aeons of darkness and superstition that have pursued the owl across borders and through time. In these two verses we encounter the hag and the owl bookending the poem together in one spell-like breath:

  Birds of omen dark and foul,

  Night-crow, raven, bat, and owl,

  Leave the sick man to his dream –

  All night long he heard you scream.

  Haste to cave and ruin’d tower,

  Ivy tod, or dingled bower,

  There to wink and mop, for, hark!

  In the mid air sings the lark.

  …

  Wild thoughts, that, sinful, dark, and deep,

  O’erpower the passive mind in sleep,

  Pass from the slumberer’s soul away,

  Like night-mists from the brow of day:

  Foul hag, whose blasted visage grim

  Smothers the pulse, unnerves the limb,

  Spur thy dark palfrey, and begone!

  Thou darest not face the godlike sun.

  On the grim dawn’s train ride north and west to Oban it was easy to see from where some of the dark imagery might have sprung. The mountains never struggled free of the gloaming mist for the whole journey, and reading the poetry of Scott beneath that glowering sky we strained to see the mountain peaks in the mist, but soon the enticing islands drew us out of any reveries. On our short but spectacular ferry crossing, the season remembered itself, warmth broke through and we shrugged off every hint of the ‘foul hag’. We arrived on the Isle of Mull in spectacular sunshine, and hauled ourselves onto the waiting bus to Fionnphort. A long hour and a half of travel through moist mountains in all the shades of heather, bracken and pine across undulating Mull (that I knew was perfect Short-eared Owl territory) and we caught our first glimpse of the little low heaven of our tiny island.

  The next morning, we awoke in the St Columba Hotel Iona to a persistent and strange sound. Far from tiny wavelets lapping at the white sand beach and thrushes chanting in the hedges, this was not the soundtrack we had been expecting. At first we thought it was someone fixing a fence with a ratchet screwdriver. We gobbled our breakfast, straining to see what it could be that was making the peculiarly annoying noise. I pocketed us a muffin each (succulent home-made domes of cranberry and white chocolate, I doubted they would last until elevenses) and we scurried out to walk the road that leads along past the abbey toward the north of the island. The ratchet screwdrivers continued. We searched the swaying meadow grass for a person with a toolbox but there was none, just a soft breeze sighing over the meadowsweet, yellow rattle and wild carrot. And there it was again, persistent as ever: ‘Crex-crex-crex.’ Then I remembered. Corncrakes! Jenny looked at me sideways. Disbelief gave way to delight as we tried to spot these shy but noisy little birds by sneaking up: we could hear them, practically at our feet, but they seemed supernaturally able to cloak themselves in the grass.

  The Hebridean islands harbour a rare population of this tantalisingly elusive crake, famous for being impossible to see. Twenty years ago there were none but now, due to the careful efforts of a handful of local crofters, the population is being restored. About fifty males arrive from Mozambique in April each year, travelling all the way to the south-western tip of the Isle of Mull, and across a final stretch to this low-lying, Atlantic-facing speck of an island-off-an-island-off-an-island. All week, night and day, our ears were rasped by the strange soundtrack of corncrakes, their calls carried on the wind and the waves. And all our time there, we searched and searched for a sighting that was never to be. One night of a full moon, a violent thunderstorm shook the isle, and from the moment that the first lightning flashed across the sound, the corncrakes raised the alarm, craking louder in response to the competition from the sky. Nobody got any sleep.

  There are many local names for the crake. Its summer call was once commonplace in damp meadows and lush grassland all over the British Isles. The names attest to its lost habitats, a bird that in the 1880s could even be heard in London’s Tooting and Streatham Common. Half the size of a grey partridge and far slimmer, this discreet bird was known as the grass quail in Cheshire, the corn scrack in Aberdeen, the daker in Surrey and the hay crake in Yorkshire. The females sit so tightly and secretively on their eggs that they cannot be seen, and in the last century scythers were often upset to discover they had accidentally cut a brave bird from its nest. Poet John Clare captured it perfectly in ‘The Landrail’:

  We hear it in the weeding time

  When knee deep waves the corn.

  We hear it in the summer’s prime

  Through meadows night and morn:

  …

  Tis like a fancy everywhere

  A sort of living doubt;

  We know tis something but it ne’er

  Will blab the secret out.

  But now, all over Britain, after decades of mechanised mowing, the territorial grating rasps have fallen silent. Here in the islands, where the fields are too small for large machinery, and more sympathetic mowing has lingered, the corncrake has held on and re-established itself. The crake has snuck here to safety, to the rocky, remote places, where roads and buildings are sparse and where it can nest peacefully as no haymaking or silage-cutting take place until later in the year when the birds have bred.

  We searched as the Hebridean winds rattled the sanctuaries of blue-green iris leaves
. We watched and waited. The corncrakes’ persistent, monotone bursts repeated as if a sprite was trailing a fingernail along a comb. We searched, but never saw one. These undisturbed grasslands host the mysterious ‘croaker of the corn’ until September when they cease croaking and quietly return to their wintering grounds in Southern Africa.

  We ventured down across the low-lying machair – Gaelic for fertile, grassy plain – an exposed, wind-blown dune pasture that forms a graceful sandy border between land and sea. These wind-scoured expanses are sculpted and chiselled by the wind, and are dependent on marram grass to hold the ground solid. Particular to the edges of the Western Isles, this delicate coastal habitat is one of the rarest in Europe, its fine, snowy sands hurled inland by regular Atlantic gales.

  The calcium-rich soil with its fine layer of white shell-sand and low-growing herb-rich cover of cropped grass has been produced by traditional crofting practices: the devotion of centuries of small-scale farming; the laying down of seaweed generation after generation, and the grazing of sheep. The constant erosion by weather, the scouring winds and rains from not just the west but all points of the compass, means that the land is under onslaught for much of the year. But this was June, it was warm and the delicately nibbled velvety carpet (evidently trimmed by rabbits as well as sheep) invited bare feet. We walked without our shoes, gazing at the scattered colours of daisy, red clover, buttercup, eyebright and harebell. Larks soared up from the wind-rippled marram grass, the lamenting voices of oystercatchers filled the air and at last it was possible to forget everything.

  Great yellow bumblebees and rare belted beauty moths thrive here, and in winter golden plover shelter among the dunes. Out to sea, we saw shelducks and great northern divers. Further round the coast, at the wonderfully named Bay at the Back of the Ocean, the eiders breed in spring, and their saucy ‘Oooo! Oooo!’ calls sound like Frankie Howerd peeping through a keyhole. When finally we clambered down to the sand, the smooth sweep of beach was so white it hurt the eyes. We sat in the shade of rocks and found clear, five-toed otter prints trailing the eyes out into the tideline.

  Further out to sea, gannets furled their sharp wings and sliced down into the indigo-blue. Beyond that three peaks rose out of the Atlantic: the Paps of Jura, a jagged island on the horizon that appeared like a huge loneliness in the mist. George Orwell exiled himself to this windy, mountainous wilderness – where deer outnumber people – to complete his bleakest of bleak novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  The journey to get to this spectacular place – rugged, sometimes harsh, always beautiful – usually involves some kind of act of devotion. Here, on this blizzard-bright island, mother and daughter together, I felt that soon Jenny would be off to the company of her friends, in a different world that marched towards other things. But for now, our differences forgotten, our bare toes plunged in the sudden swish of cold salt water, and the wind mussing our hair, my heart felt ready to brim over.

  *

  ‘They call them “Brown Yogles” in Shetland,’ Rory told us, scanning the moorland from the driver’s window of his jeep. ‘Very difficult to see! I’ve see them there, though, flying in from the sea …’

  Our week was nearly over, but I had felt sure there would be Short-eared Owls on Mull, and had made a few tweet messages and then some phone calls. At Craignure we’d met with Rory, a local birding friend of a friend. Surprised that it was not sea eagles or otters that we wanted, he promised us he could find some owls and drove us back into the hills towards Bunessan.

  ‘Bingo. Found one,’ Rory signalled from beneath his binoculars.

  ‘Where?’ Jenny said, looking at the exact spot Rory had indicated, a few yards along a fence by the road. The owl was so camouflaged, as if it were a piece of the fence it was sitting on, that, like the corncrake, it seemed to be shrouded in a cloak of invisibility. Jenny and I struggled to locate it.

  ‘They hunt along the sides of the road in the long grass,’ Rory said. ‘I’ve seen six or seven at a time. But you need to know what you’re looking for. They fly low, and really don’t show up well.’

  Very softly he set up his telescope, and adjusted the height so we could see. It was as easy as that. Magnified in the lens we saw every detail of that owl’s face. It was staring directly at us, ear tufts on the alert. We could see the startling eyes set within the deep black of its mask, so close that I felt goose pimples shoot up my arms and all the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. All those months looking and searching for a bird that seemed to be defined by its absence, and Rory had found one for me in minutes. Perhaps they were just more visible when they were in their breeding grounds?

  ‘They always nest on the ground,’ Rory told us. ‘Just in a scrape. You have to know what you’re looking for. There may be a nest nearby, or even several, as they can nest communally, but you wouldn’t know it. They tuck them away and blend them into the grass so well. Did you know that when she’s on eggs, the female has to squeeze her eyes nearly closed so that she doesn’t show up with those bright yellow peepers? They’d show up on the moor like headlights to other birds! It’s true of all the owls that have yellow or orange eyes, actually – they have to do everything they can to blend in when they’re sitting on eggs. But even if they sit too long on the fence, or even on a tussock, the gulls come and mob them, and the crows can come and take the eggs, if they’re not careful.’

  Jenny said nothing for a moment as she adjusted the scope for herself, and then she gasped. The clarity of the owl’s spooky face magnified in the lens gave us both the shivers. The bright facial disc was starkly white-rimmed and almost heart-shaped, the white brows dipping down between the eyes, just like the Barn Owl. I had not remembered this from my previous sighting all the way down south on Dartmoor; the owl had approached me so quickly and then veered away. This time, having it magnified like this, I was able to learn something more, and as the owl swivelled its face, reacting to every tiny sound, we admired the dark flecks on the neck and creamy breast, the way the wings were allowed to droop slightly, as if it were ready to take off at any minute. And when it did fly off I saw, or rather heard, its display flight; as the sun flashed like brass on those long slender primary flight feathers and it clapped its wings together the sound echoed sharply back to us; the brightness of it rang out, as if those wings had been mined from deep out of the moor, their surface forged from metal.

  My quest to track down the Short-eared Owl had taken me from Serbia, to my home on Dartmoor, and onto a remote Scottish isle. And so it was, with this final sighting, I had completed a migration of sorts, and seen every species of owl in the UK.

  Or had I?

  Bubo bubo

  EURASIAN EAGLE OWL

  I come with messages

  from the darkest place. An infant coughing blood

  in the village, a woman on the bed of the Ruhuhu river,

  her eye sockets hollow, a fist printing a boy’s face.

  I trouble the shadows with my mourning song:

  hoot-hoo-hoo-buhuhu-hoo. They shot my love

  with a wooden arrow and nailed his white chest

  to the doorframe to drive me away.

  LIZ BERRY, ‘Owl’

  Just one glance at this owl dashes any thoughts of cuteness into the flames of Hades. It is possibly the largest owl in the world; if not by wingspan (the fearsome Blakiston’s fish owl is the other contender for the size prize), it might win by a few grams in weight. With prominent ear tufts, shocking orange eyes topped with vivid eyelids, a brown-streaked front and bright white throat patch, fully feathered legs and boxing-glove feet, this big guy is armed with truly intimidating weaponry. Its jugular-crushing talons and flesh-ripping bill appear to be forged from cast iron and sharpened to scimitar points. How can it be, then, that this menacing owl is increasingly popular as a pet in Britain?

  This heavyweight ranges between 1,500 grams to 4,600 grams (the females are often up to a kilo heavier than the males). You wouldn’t usually want to approach it without th
e protection of a riot visor or a motorcycle helmet at the very least. But surely one would never attack or injure a human? This is exactly what happens when owls such as these are kept in captivity and not handled with extreme caution.

  The Eagle Owl, it has to be said, is not native to the UK. But once, many thousands of years ago, it was. It is believed to have disappeared from the skies of Britain 10,000 years ago, around the end of the last period of glaciation. The latest record of a native bird being found in Britain was from some subfossil bones that were discovered in Ossom’s cave in Derbyshire, where Mesolithic human hunters may potentially have used the owl for food. The bone found was a 10,000-year-old tarsometatarsus, the bone that forms the lower leg in birds. In mammals the metatarsus bone is actually in the upper foot, and more horizontal, giving an interesting view into skeletal evolution: in a mammal the bone is in the foot, and in the owl it is elongated as if the upper half of it has extended and become positioned vertically. We will never know for sure what these humans were doing with it, but the bone marks the last-known record of this species in Britain. No later presence has been proven since. Until recently.

  A secret (if tiny) feral population, possibly escapees or unofficially released from captivity, are known to be breeding quietly and successfully in the wild in the UK. With some splash publicity from the BBC One Show and Springwatch in 2016, very carefully filmed so as not to disclose the exact location, most people were surprised to hear about these owls. It may be big but it is shy, very camouflaged and wisely keeps a low profile. Most of us would not even know they were there.