That kept so many warm.
EMILY DICKINSON, ‘“Hope” is the Thing with Feathers’
I was not entirely ready for the scale of my next owl, especially after studying what was reputed to be the biggest owl in the world. But sometimes it is the small things that can touch the heart the most powerfully.
The smallest owl in the world (by weight) is the Elf Owl. I couldn’t travel to Texas or Mexico to see it, so sadly that was out. I would never see its elfin yellow eyes peering out of what must be the best place in the world for a nest: a tiny borehole high up in a giant cactus. But there was something nearly as good, and like so many of the wonders I’d seen on my owl quest, this one had not been in the original plan. All this time I had been thinking that Athene noctua, the Little Owl, was the smallest owl I would ever see. But I was taken by surprise. When you tell people that you are interested in owls it is not long before they tap very quickly into the idea, and begin to send you interesting things.
The mystery package arrived from my owl-loving friend Christine in France. Although she had on one occasion given me a glow-in-the-dark owl lamp, I always opened her gifts with anticipation of something good. Without wanting to seem churlish, I have to admit to a slowly expanding roomful of owl things: candles, cups, cards, pictures, Christmas decorations, tiles, coasters, ornaments, statuettes etc. Really I was happy with wild owls, especially as most of the owl gifts have not much use beyond being an attractive in-the-moment gift idea. I was increasingly uncomfortable with the way man-made tributes to this creature were piling up in my office. It seemed as though the whole world was commercialising something that didn’t want to be commercialised. Going to see them in the wild as part of an eco-tourism trip was one thing, but this endless objectifying fetish that was commodifying the owl into cute faces on cups and candles was not sitting comfortably.
This owl gift, however, was more thoughtful than most. It was a thank-you for the wedding present I had given Christine and Marianne. I had got them a delicate, hand-carved Finnish ‘fanbird’: two birds in flight, joined together beak to beak, as a mobile to hang in their window. Sometimes it is the small gestures that create ripples in life, and this one was about to unleash a capacious bow wave. I had told Christine that the British owls would be quite enough to satisfy me and my readers and I didn’t need any extra French species, thank you very much. But then I had been tempted to Serbia, to Finland, and to Spain, and soon after that a steady stream of new photographic owl cards, books and other information arrived as my French friend relentlessly persuaded me to visit. She wanted me to see the species of owl we did not have over here in England. Did I know of the Scops Owl, by the way? Or the Tengmalm’s Owl? Very old friends know exactly which buttons to press.
In truth I had been ignoring a whole group of owls that I thought were beyond my reach, not being native to the UK, but it turned out they were less out of reach than I had imagined. In Europe we have thirteen resident, native species. I had only seen half of them. Why stop there? With the visit to Serbia, the strange and unexplained appearance of the Exeter Eagle Owl, and then the Finland journey, my world was slowly becoming an owl vortex. ‘Beware of what you invite into your life,’ one shamanic friend said to me over a cup of tea in the Thrive café in Totnes. ‘What do you think owl energy brings?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Maybe something predator-ish?’
‘It’s more than that. They’re stealthy, solitary, reluctant to show themselves. You can’t ever know what kind of thing Owl might bring, what truths it might reveal.’
It was the provoking way she said it that made me decide to find out. First I looked on an owl spirit-animal website, and that explained some of the things ‘Owl’ can mean in your life. Whether the advice was directly connected with owls or not, it seemed to be wise:
You may need to remove yourself from the noise of life and become the still, silent observer. After slowing down and becoming stable you will be amazed by the wealth of information and meaning that surrounds you. It may be bringing you the ability to see what others may miss. Open your eyes and truly examine how things are, you will be surprised that suddenly you can see things that are normally hidden from view – like the motives of those around you. You’ll see into the shadows. External appearances will give way to the truth and meaning hidden beneath.
I liked this, but I also began to feel unsettled as more and more owls crowded in on my life. ‘I see your English owls,’ Christine must have said to herself in a kind of spell under her breath, wrapping my present and popping it in the post, ‘and I raise you with our French owls.’ Now I viewed her as saying all this in a sly French accent, her eyes narrowed as if instigating some deep magic.
I unwrapped the present, fought through the impossibly tight cellophane packaging and slipped what turned out to be a new DVD straight into the machine. It was an owl documentary film, entirely narrated in French. I paused it and went to get myself a cup of tea and my trusty old Robert French dictionary. My undergraduate degree had been in French but I would have to pay careful attention to catch all the ornithological vocabulary. I checked the cover of the DVD. On it was an owl that looked like a Little Owl, une Chevêche, but it was not. It was far littler. And angrier-looking. It had even bushier and more formidable eyebrows than Athene noctua. I ran to get my copy of Heimo Mikkola’s formidable Owls of the World. No, a very different bird from la Chevêche, the Little Owl; this was la Chevêchette. That sounded like an extra-little owl. To you and me it is known as Glaucidium passerinum, the Eurasian Pygmy Owl.
A Pygmy Owl? I didn’t know such a thing existed. I flipped through Mikkola’s pages and a whole world of Pygmy Owls opened up. There were twenty species of this tiny beast. Beyond Europe, from the Pearl-spotted Pygmy to the Ferruginous Pygmy, through Cuban to Andean types, this thrush-sized cutie was spread all over the Americas. And all of them, in Mikkola’s photographic guide, had those same furious yellow eyes. My mind boggled at the mysteries of evolution. I pressed play and the story of this tiny owl whirred into its gorgeous soundtrack.
Shot entirely on location in the Vercors plateau bordering the Alps of south-eastern France, the film opened with aerial shots and panoramas of a wilderness area I had never heard of. Amongst an enticing anthemic theme tune it zoomed down to the pine forest, and closer-in still, to an ornithologist’s-eye view of the tiny Pygmy Owl perched on a twig. Framed amongst the soft needles of a spruce tree, its pure lemon eyes glistened as it warmed itself in the sun. As the camera lovingly lingered, the minute owl stretched out one small, blunt wing, to make a perfect fan of its barred flight feathers. The sunlight fell through its plumage, and then it flexed its short tail and puffed out its silky plumage into an appealing miniature pear shape. Then an extreme close-up of its austere face revealed a yellow, hooked bill, as sharp and fit-for-purpose as that of any larger raptor. This owl was no shrinking violet. It was a compact, sparrow-sized little toughie. There was no discernible facial disc but its beak was bewhiskered by tiny facial feathers emanating from white brows and ‘eye bows’. The speckled forehead revealed itself, a kind of flattened, glittery toupé, and when the head swivelled I could see an ingenious design on the hind neck, of dark eye patches with white surrounds called an ‘occipital’ or ‘false’ face – an evolutionary trick designed to deter predators. The heavily white-streaked breast and belly gave its whole form a ‘cloaked’ appearance as if it were wrapped in a generous, home-knitted body warmer.
The Eurasian Pygmy Owl, Glaucidium passerinum, weighing in at only 60 to 80 grams, is unique in its lightning flight, ferocious hunting and wispily intimidating eyebrows. The irascible expression perfectly encircled by grey-brown pale-speckled plumage has evolved to vanish into the res-in-scented boughs and sifting light of mountainous spruce forests and glaciated grassy clearings. This bird is a relic of the Ice Age. During de-glaciation when the ice began to melt and forest spread over the mountains, colonising the area with spa
rse tree-covered slopes and leaving valleys with clearings and areas of exposed limestone, the upland-loving Pygmy Owl profited from the variety in the forest landscape. It thrived on the small prey available, exploiting the great spotted woodpeckers whose nest cavities it depended upon to breed. Here was a diminutive raptor turbo-charged with the dynamite of a top predator.
The film continued. The camera panned in from a geo map to the precise location on the edge of the Alps – so now I knew exactly where it was – then showed a view of the magnificent limestone cliffs, a vast extrusion that forms 40 kilometres of impenetrable wall along the edge of the plateau that protects this area, the largest natural reserve in France. For scientists here the Pygmy Owl is an indicator of the health of the mountain forest. How it chooses its territory, how it lives, these questions and more formed the subject of a survey and study carried out by one man, commissioned by the LPO (the Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux, the French equivalent of our RSPB and BTO). The expert presenter, the Pygmy Owl Man, was Gilles Trochard, an experienced naturalist of thirty years. Here was a professional who apparently had spent years of his life trudging about after the tiny owls in the snows and blistering heat of these mountains.
The first objective was to locate breeding pairs of this tiny owl (an owl, my new hero Gilles pointed out in the voiceover, that most of the general public do not even know exists). Gilles arrived at a cabin enshrouded in snow and ice, the place he was to be based during the months of his study. And while he shovelled his way into the cabin, hefting the snowdrifts out of the way, he explained that temperatures this winter had been as low as minus 35 degrees Celsius.
Delicate winged things formed a gathering in my stomach. This discreet, furtive owl and its wild forest landscape of upland taiga forest in southern France, all suddenly seemed within reach. I didn’t stand a chance, and Christine knew it. I had to go there. I had to see this owl. I had to meet this person. This would involve more travel. And a new expert. An expert on an owl so delightful and so tiny that the Eagle Owl could swallow it in one gulp, or, as Gilles was later to quip with twinkling eyes: ‘Il pourrait l’écraser comme une compote de pomme!’ – he could squash him like a pot of apple puree.
No, there was nothing to be done: I wanted to find this tiny owl, meet its lone advocate, and learn about the strange and mysterious life of a new, little-known predatory bird. I felt sure that Pygmy Owl Man Gilles would help me.
All this time I had been content with the owls that I had so far found. That is until I set eyes upon this little film star, La Discrète Chevêchette. Here was an owl that could flatten its head feathers and do an accurate impression of a goshawk, whilst inhabiting a body around one tenth of the size. La Chevêchette, as it is known in France, the ‘little Little Owl’, can hunt and kill birds which are far bigger than itself. Here was a predator that would fit inside a coffee cup but could fight woodpeckers for their nests with all the va-va-voom of a double espresso.
Jenny walked into the room while I was formulating a plan in my head.
‘Mum, are you OK? This is the third time you’ve watched that film.’
‘Never mind that, look at this!’ I made her sit down and watch a part with me: Jenny patiently sat on the edge of the sofa, and admitted that the Vercors plateau did look lovely, but the persistent whistling the owl made grated after a while and she drifted off, leaving me alone with my new crush.
‘The best time to find where the owl will nest is in the spring,’ Gilles said from beneath his snow hood. ‘And it’s simply the sound of the call that will give him away, far better than any GPS.’ Gilles used a secret weapon, a special whistle named an ocarina, to lure the owl, but its use was only permitted for scientific research. The only way I too could see this owl would be to accompany Gilles on one of his forays.
I had to find out what Jenny’s opinion was about one more thing. I called her back. I couldn’t see this owl in Britain, so would have to go and visit this man; what did she think of him? Did she think Gilles would be a good guide to all things pygmy? Or would he be a prima donna? There was something delicate about his expression and body language. Would he be precious with his knowledge? I asked Jenny, trusting the clear-sighted experience of her years, her highly critical eye and most of all, her plain-speaking.
‘I don’t know why you think he’d be difficult. I have yet to meet a Frenchman who isn’t … stylish,’ she said, searching for that last adjective carefully. ‘I think you shouldn’t worry. Since he’s made this film, and loves wildlife as much as that, he must be a good guy.’
I went back to the film feeling happier. Perched at the summit of a dead spruce, the Pygmy Owl was perfectly disguised – it could have been a blob of the grey-green lichen that was slathered over the trees and streaking every branch and twig.
As the name suggests, the Pygmy Owl is the tiniest of all the European owls. It has a small head (which explains the pear shape) and no ear tufts, with a less defined facial disc than many other owls. This may be because this is a daylight and crepuscular hunting owl and it does not need the massive sound receptacle many owls have; it can rely more on eye-sight than hearing. It flies in rapid bursts, and when it lands, it cocks its relatively long tail upwards, like a wren. It flicks this from side to side when perched, as if agitated by a fit of nerves. In the winter, it is easier to see around human settlements because it leaves its breeding grounds in the mountains and comes down to hunt garden birds. It flies noisily down from its lookouts at the tops of small trees and pounces on its prey in flight, like a shrike. But this was the friendly owl depicted in so many of the Hieronymus Bosch paintings. In French folklore, for people it is a benevolent owl, one that brings good luck to travellers. Its sweet, piping call would accompany pilgrims on their journeys.
I still went online to do a bit of checking – I won’t say stalking – about Gilles. To my delight, my sleuthing quickly came up with a wildlife tour company with Gilles’s name attached. It turned out that he did week-long tours of the very place in the film! A whoosh of adrenaline flooded me. A group (of which, potentially, I could be a part) would be taken to see the very locations, the very owls starring in that film! I couldn’t believe my luck, and immediately checked out the price. It was quite a lot. But that didn’t matter. Some things are meant to be, and anyway, I owned a credit card. I allowed myself one more watch of the DVD, revising some of the specialist ornithological vocabulary in French.
In fact, now there was a reason, I’ll admit that I watched the film again and again, learning every bit of the vocabulary, until I could perfectly pronounce pelotes de rejection (owl pellets), nichoir (nest box) and logeoscope (there is no translation of this invention but the closest I can think of is ‘nest viewer’). I learned to say them accurately enough to hold my own, I hoped, amongst a group of French twitchers. They would have high standards and I wanted to blend in. The logeoscope was in fact Gilles’s own invention for spying on the tiny owl in its nest: it consisted of a stealth viewer attached to a pole made out of collapsible fishing rods that extended up to 9.5 metres long, and wired up to a laptop. With this, the inhabitants of any nest could be safely observed with minimum disturbance. Using it Gilles found that the owls usually laid between four and six eggs, but occasionally even up to seven, although not all would fledge.
The film placed Gilles somewhere on the spectrum between obsessively committed loner and serious naturalist. It showed him cross-country skiing stylishly through the mountains in his sunglasses and outdoor stealth gear, carrying his special gadgetry like an ornithological James Bond. Amongst the gravelly French narration and rousing musical soundtrack, I clicked send, and off into the stratosphere went my more than pygmy-sized deposit for the owl trip. Soon I too would be sliding gracefully upon cross-country skis over the snowy plateau, helping Gilles with his logeoscope. All I wanted was to learn from him, exchange ideas about owl conservation and the attitudes of the conservationists and government authorities. Were the French as protective and knowle
dgeable about their owls as the British? Did they too have owl-aholics?
I sat waiting anxiously for the return email. Then I ordered myself the French version of my Collins Bird Guide. I would revise and learn as many French bird names as I could. The first good sign was the quick reply I got from Gilles’s colleague and partner in business, Pierre Boutonnet. Pierre had started the tour company himself and had soon roped in his expert naturalist friend Gilles, who was equally devoted and experienced in guiding groups. I was delighted to find out that with his good level of English he already had the otter book that I had written during my obsessive four-year otter quest that took me all over the British Isles in search of my mustelline quarry. If Pierre, Gilles’s colleague, had read my book that was a very good start. We could almost be friends. Pierre sent through the fiche technique that contained all the details of the trip: we were promised all eight species of owl that were present in the Vercors and Drôme region: the Barn, Tawny, Long-eared, Little, Tengmalm’s, Scops, Pygmy and Eagle Owls.
*
My owl quest was changing, spreading its wings. When I had first set out to write this book, I had envisaged covering the five (or six) native British species, and had planned to stay within the confines of the British Isles, thereby avoiding too much travel. But this level-headed plan had already fallen by the wayside and my horizons had widened, what with my trips to Serbia and Finland. I now found myself tantalisingly within reach of seeing all of the European species … The Ural owl I had seen in Finland, and the trip to Vercors would bump the owl count up to nine, leaving only three species unsighted: the Hawk Owl, the Great Grey Owl and the Snowy Owl. I was learning something about myself here. The burning need to know more about these difficult-to-know species was what kept me going. Now that it had deepened and widened it felt unstoppable. I was drawn to the endless challenge of finding out something that resists being found out about; it was the same with my first love, Lutra lutra, the Eurasian otters. A wealth of information and meaning would surround me, the owl oracle had said. I would be able to see what others might miss. I couldn’t wait.
Owl Sense Page 24