Owl Sense

by Miriam Darlington

  Back in my comfortable room at the auberge I looked over my finds: pine cones, Pygmy Owl pellets, a woodpecker feather. I wrapped the delicate objects as carefully as treasure, and stowed them safe in my case to bring home.

  I returned to what seemed like the end of the world, or my part of the world, at least. The Brexit vote left the nation shocked and I consoled myself with the friendships I had built across the Channel, bonds that no political decision could harm. And the tiny Pygmy Owl became for me, in that moment, a heart-warming symbol of hope in a storm, a ‘King of Birds’ as in the words of singer Karine Polwart:

  At Ludgate Hill

  where the towers of smoke and mirrors bruise the sky

  the pilgrims huddle in

  as the tiny King of Birds begins to cry

  the people start to sing

  to light glory in the dark

  to ring the bell

  and to breathe hope in every heart

  ‘King of Birds’

  With thanks to Karine Polwart and Hegri Music

  Bubo scandiacus

  SNOWY OWL

  A crystal note alighting

  on the Cornish tundra,

  you bring news

  of the next glacial blowing.

  Coded in your feathers,

  an address

  with no letters and no numbers.

  Moon fatale.

  You spread your wings

  so there’s no shade

  between your feathers.

  I press my cheek against the edges

  of your flight feathers

  and feel like my heart’s breaking.

  ROSEMARIE CORLETT, ‘Snowy Owl’

  In the spring of 2017 a Snowy Owl came to Orkney. It was a female, and I discovered about her visit too late. By the time I could have been on the train and boat, and completed my 700-mile journey, she could have flown the 400 miles back to Norway, or elsewhere. Soon enough she was long gone; but not before some astute and enthusiastic Orcadians had taken several lovely photos of her perched comfortably on a gnarly, dry stone wall and flying low, catching the evening sunlight on her bright wings as she quartered the grassy fields for lemmings. There are no lemmings on Orkney, and so the owl quickly moved on.

  The Snowy’s breeding grounds are found scattered over the northern Arctic tundra, and so she may well have felt at home in this windswept outcrop in the north Atlantic. Snowy Owls mostly live north of the timber line in treeless wastes: in Europe they have been found in the mountainous regions of Norway and Swedish Lapland, and sometimes northern Finland. A vagrant pair once bred on Fetlar, Shetland. They are still occasionally seen in the northern isles, but only as visitors, and never stopping to breed.

  How I longed to see one. To look into the Snowy Owl’s fierce, gold eyes must be like gazing into the spirit of the Arctic. The more I found out about them, the more the longing grew. The Snowy and the Great Grey were now my twin grails, the unreachable ones, and along with the Hawk Owl in Finland, they formed the tundra trinity that had got away. But for now, Jenny was about to sit her A levels, then Rick was thinking of changing jobs, and worst of all his mother Wendy had been taken seriously ill. Life for a while would be about hunkering down, caring, consolidating, staying at home. I told myself that I would see the remaining owls one day. They would be a cool glow on my horizon, something to hope for next year, an aurora borealis of sorts. Twinkling like a star in the dark, Gilles had said that he wanted me to help him formulate a northern owls and other birds trip to Finland. I could go along as the English speaker, a role I would have loved, but with so many other challenges coming all at once, the idea had to be packed away and the owls could wait.

  The Snowy Owl is very different from all the other owls I’d seen. It is circumpolar in its range, highly nomadic and hard to pinpoint outside breeding times. With no possibility of new travels, I went to the library to find out more. This way, when I did find one, it would be an informed view.

  Early surveys carried out in the 1990s in Arctic Russia enabled scientists to create snapshot estimates of the total world Snowy Owl population. But even with estimates there were problems, as the population varies spatially and temporally: Eugene Potapov and Richard Sale in their beautiful Poyser Monograph on the Snowy Owl suggest that ‘estimating its size is akin to standing beneath a locust swarm and counting insects, but with no knowledge of how long ago the front of the swarm passed, or how far away the swarm’s rear is’.

  However, the advantage comes at breeding time, at which point the owls must slow down, and will choose a location based on the abundance of small rodents. We do know that this species of owl is thought to form variable ‘breeding pockets’ across the global tundra region, and within that, pairs might have a breeding territory of 25 square kilometres depending on the population cycle and availability of their main food source, the lemming. A rough ‘guesstimate’ (Potapov and Sale again) has put numbers at around 13,000 pairs worldwide, on average, but these can double after a series of good lemming seasons, and equally might dip steeply after a deep lemming population depression. Because of the lemming cycles, the Snowy Owl often performs vast migrations across sparsely populated areas, making individuals hard to find and the population extremely difficult to count.

  Looking at these details more closely, I felt this owl must be even closer to the essence of wildness than all my other owls. At around 70 centimetres tall the dense, compact Snowy is designed for survival in extreme cold. Its insulation, the soft, pure-white plumage, is designed for long periods standing on the snow. It has the most densely feathered feet and toes of any owl, even having plumage between the toes, and close up they look as if they are sporting an elegant pair of furry ski boots. But the perfect plumage is not simply for warmth and camouflage. It might also be useful for sexual signalling, and can be dotted with dusky patterning; the females are more darkly barred with charcoal-black feather tips. Both sexes have a faintly visible facial disc topped with invisible greyish ear tufts, and a yellow bill set beneath an extravagant white moustache of vibrissae – I assumed these sensitive bristles evolved as protective insulation to prevent the bird’s nostrils freezing over during the Arctic winter, but they are in fact employed to detect information about the prey it has just caught by gently brushing it in order to ‘smell’ it! Like many owls, Snowies have very poor close-up vision, as their sight has evolved especially to watch things at long range across the rolling tundra, such as its main predator the Arctic fox, or its main winter prey items, the willow grouse and the ptarmigan.

  In spite of the owl’s furry ski boots, ornithologists know that when winter sets in and ice takes hold of the northern landscape the Snowies begin their migration south. An airport does not seem like a prime owl location, but for several years Logan airport in Boston Massachusetts was chosen by many of these birds as an overwintering spot. In spite of the jet engines, people and pollution, the owls came to the grassy fields of the airport, proving that once habituated, an owl can put up with an awful lot of noise and disruption. They were attracted to the short-mown, tundra-like grassland, and the abundance of rodents and birds.

  Between 1981 and 1993 many of the owls were carefully captured and colour-marked to find out about their movements and if they were a risk to the air traffic. They were marked on the head with an ink that lasted three months, allowing them to be identified at a distance without capturing them, then they were ringed, and released. Now their north–south movements could be monitored. Arriving in November they often stayed until late spring, and one owl repeatedly returned each year for a decade, another for sixteen years. Over time, 385 owls were trapped and ringed, and it was noted that no two had exactly the same plumage. They had individual personalities, it was found, and roosted on the ground just outside the airfield during the day, becoming active and returning to hunt on the airfield at dusk, as they prefer to be primarily nocturnal. They liked to sit on an elevated perch with a viewpoint, and would hunt like a falcon, often pursuing and c
atching birds in flight. Pellet analysis showed their remarkably catholic taste, from fish and birds to other raptors, including other owls. Predictably, with the fast-moving jets and blinding lights at night, eventually one owl became entangled in an engine turbine and nearly caused an accident. It was decided that to avoid danger to all, the owls should be captured and released at a safer site, but a huge amount had already been learned from the owls of Logan airport.

  *

  Most commonly found in northerly climes, such as Canada, Alaska and northern Russia, the Snowy Owl seldom makes it further south. However, it is also a nomadic bird, and I did find that its wanderings have been occasionally known to take it as far south as Hawaii. One arrived at an airport there, too, and had to be removed for safety reasons. So I knew that this owl could achieve spectacular southerly journeys and could easily cross vast areas of ocean. It is not native to the UK, however, and I couldn’t quite believe it would ever be found here in the British Isles, and certainly not any further south than Orkney, surely? But when a Snowy Owl was reported in West Penwith, Cornwall, a few miles from where Rick’s mother Wendy lived, my heart gave a small flip and a surge of hopeful adrenaline charged into my veins. Could this possibly be true? ‘I remember when I was very small,’ Wendy told me with interest, ‘that one day at school we were told a Snowy Owl had landed on the roof and we were to very quietly go out and look at it.’

  This must have been during the Second World War, while Wendy was still in junior school. I was encouraged. There seemed to be a historical precedent. A quick search found other equally astonishing local sightings of this Arctic bird in West Penwith over the years. A wild Snowy had appeared in the St Just area in 2008 causing much excitement and hordes of twitchers swarmed in from all over Britain. In 2010 one was seen again, and in 2011. As recently as 2013 Snowies had been sighted here, all focused around the same area of west Cornwall. My mind computed this. The reported sightings, confirmed year on year, were verified as true.

  To see one of these Arctic birds would be like meeting a deity of the north, an icon of desolate, boggy, lichen-clad plains, forest edges, rocky promontories and shores edged with sea ice. What could have happened to bring it here? I thought nothing like this usually came our way, and certainly not at Easter time. A phone call to a Cornish cousin, Lisa, a keen birdwatcher, quickly confirmed the presence of the Snowy Owl in West Penwith. ‘A beautiful male, pure white,’ she said. ‘I saw it while walking the dogs.’ Females are flecked with black, I remembered, but males sport no more than a few charcoal flecks which often fade with age.

  The evidence was stacking up. After all, these birds have often been known to travel vast distances over water during what are called ‘irruptions’, mass migrations from the Arctic. For many years these invasions puzzled scientists and birders. These are familiar winter birds in southern Canada and the fields of the northern United States, but the arrival of hundreds of owls in places like Alberta and Montreal in Canada was something of a mystery. From the 1940s studies had begun to survey the movements of the owls. Hunters, trappers, taxidermists and amateurs who completed Christmas bird counts helped to gather data.

  Scientific interest about the causes and the ecological impacts of the Snowies’ movements increased. During an irruption they travel in loose groups, called boids, flying westwards as well as southwards, and the data gathered indicated that they were driven by climatic conditions and food availability. Just as lynx had been shown to be influenced by the movements and abundance of hares, the owls were shown to be following prey. Generally they need large rodents like lemmings as their main food, and when times are good lemmings make up 90 per cent of their diet, but if the lemming population runs out, the birds will move on to search for grouse and ptarmigan, and if they fly to the edges of the sea ice, they will feed on water birds such as eider and gulls. In North America, they are attracted south to arable winter fields, and during irruptions they have occasionally been found as far south as California, and one was even seen in Bermuda.

  Satellite and telemetry have shown that the owls avoid thick forest during the winter migration. This may be because of the risk of predation by Eagle Owls in Europe and Great horned Owls in North America. Like all owl species they have the same plumage in winter as summer, so their pure white feathers are highly visible in areas without snow. Snowy Owl corpses have been found in America predated by golden eagle, and in a gruesome twist, only the protein-rich brain had been eaten. Telemetry research shows that they always cross forest as quickly as possibly whilst migrating, preferring to stay on vantage points in open fields and clear-cut forest.

  Why Snowies migrate and how they choose where to go is complex. Their movements are thought to be due to a combination of winter lemming availability, snow thickness and crucially the movements of other Snowies. When they are breeding at the end of the winter and into the early spring, the owls seem to behave gregariously, and often follow where they notice others flying, as if sensing there might be some feeding that way. In the breeding grounds location is at a premium; the first to arrive will pick the best spots, and the later owls the less good ones, and so on. So where a pair is found breeding, there will likely be another pair nearby. Often during migration, they’ll find a good perch, stay a few days, or a few weeks at most, startling and enchanting local residents lucky enough to see them, and then they’ll move on until they find suitable breeding places. In Europe, it is a little different, and the owls appear to move around far less; although not so much is known about these owls, it is thought that usually they are more sedentary than their transatlantic cousins.

  In the last hundred years, only twenty-nine Snowy Owls have been ringed in the United Kingdom and Ireland, but over four hundred accepted records of sightings exist. I watched Twitter. On this particular occasion, at first none of the local bird groups or rare bird alert forums in England had mentioned a Snowy in Cornwall. Unusual blow-ins of this sort normally cause their own kind of perfect storm. Surely there would have been a vortex of attention on social media. There appeared to be nothing yet.

  But then the morning after the Cornwall owl call from cousin Lisa, somebody else had seen the owl, taken a picture, confirmed it was a Snowy, and alerted Twitter. Joining the rush, Rick and I bundled ourselves into the car and drove a frantic two hours on no breakfast to the location of the sighting. The Snowy had been spotted at St Just, right at the far end of Cornwall, close to Land’s End. I was tense, and worried that in this position right on the tip of the peninsula, jutting out into the Atlantic, harried by gulls, it would not stay long.

  At St Just we burst excitedly into Warren’s the bakers to buy a breakfast of hot, freshly baked pasties to fortify ourselves. Everyone local here knew exactly what was happening, so we asked the baker about the owl. Yes, a wild Snowy had indeed been seen on the edge of the village, she told us. We walked into the sleepy square and found more people to ask. One by one, all of the locals we met confirmed it. Photographic evidence on Twitter revealed the bird taking refuge, hunkered low against a granite wall looking a little bedraggled. As well as the striking curve of its ivory head, its implacable golden gaze looked weary. The perfect white plumage with just a very few faint grey flecks on its back and wings showed it was indeed a male. Its heftily feathered feet perched cool as melting snowdrifts amongst the sunshine and gorse of the Cornish peninsula. Snowy Owls roost on or close to the ground, often preferring rock-strewn areas which provide vantage points to look out for wolves on the tundra. No predators like that here, but plenty of locals had seen it, and some twitchers had appeared and photographed the owl.

  We took a left at the clock tower, hurried past the baker’s factory and arrived at the spot. No owl. Perhaps it had got fed up with the pestering paparazzi, or perhaps it had realised its mistake and simply moved on. Snowy Owls do this. They effortlessly drift, just not normally in this part of the planet. Later though, the owl was seen posing by a popular Cornish landmark, an early Bronze Age holed stone, the Mên-an
-Tol. (If you pass through the hole nine times you can be cured of rickets, legend has it, and when Benji was a toddler we had done the same for him in the hope of curing his infantile eczema.) The stone was reputed to harbour a potent piskie and it could return changeling children to their mothers. Now it was gifted with a visitation from a Snowy Owl. It is hard to go anywhere in this part of Cornwall and not feel infused with its mysteries.

  From the misty cliff top at Cape Cornwall we saw gannets spearing down into the blue depths to catch fish, and fulmars wheeled around precarious nesting sites. But the wild essence of sea ice, the neighbour of the Inuit, narwhal and polar bear: where was he? By the end of the day we had developed ‘owl neck’ from craning our heads upwards and around to search the rocks and cliffs for our Snowy. We scoured the boulder-strewn camouflage of the Bronze Age field patterns and tors of Nancledra, Towednack and Zennor. As we moved back and forth through the rocks, thickets and furze every bright stone and white gull caught the sun and flared into an owl shape.

  Withy nooks of pollen-rich pussy willow, bright gorse, wind-whipped hazel and battered daffodil fields yielded nothing, but I began to see how the grizzled moorland and rocky tussocks of this place mimicked the raised bogs and marshes of the tundra and might attract a voyaging Snowy Owl. We flushed a sparrowhawk from the high-walled lane and I saw my first swallow of the year. I’m not sure if it was the bite of the wind or being so tired that brought wetness to my eyes just then. I thought of the vast distances travelled by these nomadic birds, and of their lonely isolation. If people do witness them in the wild here in Europe, it is only rare and fleetingly, cryptic clues to the restless wanderings of a creature that seems always just beyond our grasp.