Owl Sense

by Miriam Darlington

  At Towednack church I walked up to the top of the hill, following cousin Lisa’s description of seeing the owl hunting in the fields below. I sat on the rocks and looked over the landscape of West Penwith. This landscape must be the closest thing to the tundra an Arctic bird could wish for: undulating, sparsely populated moorland, sporadic granite outcrops and rodent-filled dry-stone walls; many cliff-dwelling seabirds and hundreds of unwary rabbits to feed on. If I were a Snowy Owl, I would be wondering where the lemmings were, and why the permafrost had melted, but I’d make do with the rabbits burrowed into the soft peat. The local herring gulls, however, always on the alert for a good brawl, had put up an effective reception for this impressive predator. The owl must have thought the same, because the next thing we knew, it had taken off and flown the twenty-eight miles out to sea, west to the Isles of Scilly, where it turned up on the tiny islands of Tresco and Bryher! Internet bird forums were all talking about it. The discussions from the Canadian and American members were the most informed and revealing. One said:

  Snowies are perfectly capable of crossing huge distances of open water when they irrupt. They have been recorded in Bermuda before, and one even made it to Hawaii somehow during the winter of ’11–’12. This year is shaping up to be another big one for Snowy owls, and they’ve been turning up all over. There were even a few on a big offshore drilling vessel in the northeast last week.

  But birders on the international forum were concerned for the UK bird, which was obviously lost: ‘The last Snowy to make it to Bermuda began feasting on the endangered cahow petrels and had to be collected. History may well repeat itself.’

  And then finally, the theory that I thought the most amazing, and when you think about it, perhaps the most plausible: ‘It’s not uncommon for Snowy Owls to land on ships near the Canadian coast and they may travel some distances that way.’ Aha, I thought. If the owl had not flown all the way across the North Sea from Norway or Sweden, it explained a lot. It is sometimes presumed that the few Snowy Owls that arrive as far south as this one are ship-assisted – perhaps arriving with timber cargo ships from Quebec. Though in the case of our Cornish owl this was just speculation, and nothing could be proven, it seemed the most likely explanation. Perhaps it had been searching for sea ice that had never materialised, and had landed on a ship to rest.

  Another knowledgeable American birder supported this idea:

  If there is not a noticeable influx of Snowy owls in the lower 48 states of the US then I’m also skeptical that this bird arrived at all naturally. Though it depends how you treat ‘ship assisted’ species – some say that it’s not a big deal if the bird is not fed on the ship and has survived the trip on its own; others say that you shouldn’t count the migration as natural if it is more or less clear that the bird is ship assisted – like for example the Iago sparrows (endemic to Cape Verde islands) arriving in the Netherlands – how did they get there? They hopped off the research ship Plancius.

  There we had it; the Snowy had probably landed on a cargo ship and been taken much further south than it intended. Although, with the only eyewitness being the owl, we could never be entirely sure. This year, 2017, there have already been several confirmed sightings of wild Snowy Owls arriving on Orkney and in the West of Ireland in Galway and Mayo.

  When it was time to leave, setting off from the highest place on the Isle of Bryher, Watch Point, where it had been last seen, the errant Snowy Owl must have flown out over the tall rocks of Shipman’s Head, heading north-north-west. Gliding over the foam and froth of Hell Bay, out toward the vast undulating landscape of the Atlantic, perhaps the expanse of sea below formed the memory of the tundra in its mind. Home. Or if not home, something like it, with its spume-capped plains and crevasses. Heading to who knows where, the owl must have gone out over the vast, watery plain, disorientated, following pathways in its head, drawn by magnetite or the remembered scent of ice. It might have made it. Or, never finding its lost edge of sea ice, it might have ditched into the waves. Some find their way home, and some do not. Nobody will know. Nobody will have seen. But somewhere, a small raft of white feathers might have vanished in a crest of foam.

  *

  Snowy Owls were once prevalent all across Europe. Their remains have been found on archaeological sites as far south as Gibraltar, suggesting that the tundra and taiga ecological zones reached to the Mediterranean area during glacial periods. This visible owl has attracted human attention since prehistoric times and in the Trois-Frères cave in Ariège, France, a well-observed image of a Snowy Owl pair and their fledgling chick have been etched. The image artfully captures the family resting on the ground, as they are known to do at breeding times. At other sites in south-west France, many accumulated Snowy Owl bones have been found, and these have been worked and modified with flint tools. Wing bones had been fashioned into tubular pieces of smoothly finished bone, and might have been used as whistles, blowpipes for painting, or as flutes.

  It is thought that during the glacial period, when wintry conditions hit, the birds descended from the high plateaus to shelter. In the open river valleys and on the plains, the owls would have formed aggregations on or close to the ground, as they are seen to do today, and they must have been easy prey for Palaeolithic people. One site in particular has the bones of at least twenty-five males and sixty-five females, outnumbering the bones of all other bird remains found at the site. Workings on them suggest that the owls were not only used as food but that possibly the skins of these owls were removed carefully and prized as a valuable resource. They may potentially have been for ritual performance. One notable painting at the Trois-Frères cave, dated to around 13,000 BC, suggests this. The famous painting, named The Sorcerer, depicts a male figure dressed in a shamanic ‘master of the animals’ costume, with a wolf’s tail, antlers on the head and an owl facial mask. Perhaps the glamour of the Snowy Owl created a natural empathetic relationship between our species. In view of the piles of Snowy bones, there seems to have been a prolonged fixation amongst early peoples of south-west France with the magical Snowy Owl.

  In the absence of any resident in Britain, if I wanted to find out more about the elusive Snowy Owl and its circumpolar habitat today I should probably go to Barrow, Alaska. Here for many generations they have not only been in close contact with Inuit people, but recently have been extensively studied in their Arctic breeding grounds.

  In the native Inupiaq language, Barrow Alaska is called Ukpeagvik, which translated means roughly ‘the place where Snowy Owls are hunted’. Whereas in Europe this rare and vulnerable bird is now protected, and they rarely come into contact with people any longer, this is not the case in Alaska. Here, a certain number of birds may be shot each year, and they may be used for clothing, or their wings used for traditional household items like dusters and brooms, or made into ceremonial or decorative items like jewellery by the local people. But there are also many local myths and stories about the Snowy Owl. Inuit legend tells of a young girl who was one day turned into an owl with a long, pointed bill. Terrified and panicking, she flew straight into a tall cliff, and accidentally flattened her face and beak. That, the story goes, is how owls have stayed ever since.

  Mythographer Joseph Campbell, in The Power of Myth, suggests that as well as helping our ancestors to make sense of the world and create answers to puzzling questions these myths can simply reveal wonder. They allow us to be amazed and enchanted with the natural world and also with ourselves. They present the possibility of connection, transformation and change, and help us to be better humans, aware of the mystique of our history and our potential. As Campbell suggests, they represent possibility, and might enliven our idea of ‘how to live a human life under any circumstances’. Owls had certainly accompanied me through many circumstances in my own life over the past years. But my situation was now dictating that my journey take a break; a trip to Alaska would be pushing it too far. I saw it as a pause, however, not a full stop. One day I would go and see Snowy Owls quartering
the tundra.

  And what of the Snowy’s threats? In my owl journey I had found a creature increasingly and consistently pressured by human activity and climate disruption. The Snowy Owl was no exception, in fact as a specialist Arctic species it seemed much more in danger than some of the others. If the pressure continues unchecked, this owl’s habitat is set to become increasingly fragmented. The conservation status of a species is set by the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and currently the status given for the Snowy Owl is ‘least concern’, basically because the species occupies such a large, undeveloped, remote territory and there is so little information on long-term population changes. ‘Despite the least concern status,’ Potapov and Sale suggest, ‘there are threats, some of them historical, some set to appear in the future, which makes the species potentially vulnerable on this unstable planet.’ These two scientists, paying close attention to changes in land use and the effects of exploitation of oil and gas, are worried about something currently very pressing. With even one more degree of climate warming, if the northern ice melts and only islands on which the bedrock stands above sea level remain as refuges, that will leave less than one third of their breeding range available to the owls: ‘This is an extreme scenario but accelerating global warming might mean that this occurs within 100 years.’

  Other spectres haunt the Snowy’s existence, putting further pressure on its survival. Historically, Arctic fox and other predator trapping was found to interfere with the already unpredictable lemming cycles, and now that the fur trade has diminished, there is still ‘bycatch’ from trapping. At one time thousands of Snowy Owls were trapped in Russia. In North America, it was for trophy hunting and in Canada the owls were considered a plump and delicious dish. In Finland, eggs were collected by the hundreds. Recently, collisions with man-made structures have been a threat, but since the Snowy Owl dwells in very sparsely inhabited places you would not consider this to be a common problem; or at least, if it is, it must go unreported. However, with increasing fossil fuel exploration, as well as the very dangerous uranium ore mining amongst the owl’s breeding territories, it is being exposed to new and lethal dangers. Its future is far from secure. Suddenly it feels as if this little-seen but precious owl, seated on high promontories on the tundra, might see its own demise. Would its ability to travel and adapt save it, or could it disappear along with the melting ice sheets?

  The Snowy Owl’s eye is one of the most highly developed of all owls’ as it needs to track distant prey in the extremes of the polar night and the slanting low sun of the spring. But bring an owl out of the Arctic and it is immediately vulnerable. It adapted to a habitat where microbes are not prevalent, and outside a cold environment its eyes are susceptible to infection and blindness. Its specialism, along with the fact that it needs lemmings to survive, may mean that as the climate is further disrupted and the tundra scrub moves north into the plains, this special owl will be seriously under threat and could eventually disappear. It is a haunting thought, that Bubo scandiacus, the ghost of the tundra, could melt from the landscape and fade away altogether.

  EPILOGUE

  As we returned home after our unsuccessful race to Cornwall, thoughts came to me in mounting drifts. The owl, especially this Snowy, had proved itself to be a keen-sighted and resilient creature. Now that my domestic life had taken some difficult turns, I was having to be clear-sighted, strong and independent, and I felt Owl-like, just as my friend had predicted. How clear-sighted we would need to be, to save these creatures! Instead of blinding and caging our magnificent wildlife, we needed to step away from our rampant materialism and think to the future.

  That night, instead of the Snowy Owl, a soft, silent reminder came. With a crystalline-clear sky an unseasonal dusting of frost arrived and we awoke to a fragile carpet of white.

  At first light Benji and I were up and out: snow is increasingly rare where we live in Devon, and Dartmoor had a covering, so breathing in the ice-scent and glitter, warmly wrapped, we declared it a ‘snow day’. I packed our emergency foil wraps and weatherproof shelter and we drove up into the blue skies and biting winds of Dartmoor.

  While many animals hunker down at this time – mice, moles and earthworms dig themselves in deeper – cossetted in our centrally heated homes, we need contact with the raw edge, risk and struggle that snow brings. Not only this, but we need contact with the wonder and transformation of snow. It struck me that the vanished Snowy Owl was like climate change; often, unseasonal warmth was robbing us, impoverishing us, of something beautiful and vital. Suddenly it all felt vividly clear; the lost owl was like a monument to lost snow. Snow can make the world seem suddenly rich; it fires us up, sharpens our emotions and (if we can manage the slipperiness and cold) fills us with glee as our bodies remember what they were made for and what they are capable of. Thousands of years ago our ancestors braved snow and ice and made huge migrations, just like the Snowy Owls. Now for a moment I felt the Snowy there under my skin.

  As if in pilgrimage we headed out into our fine layer of snow. We slinked over the ice-slipped roads that flank the edge of the moor, bounced over a cattle grid and skidded to a halt by a stand of beeches. No shelter here: the wind bellowed in the bare twigs and the trunks were sprayed foamy white all down their northerly sides. We crunched through a magic carpet of ice crystals towards the high vantage point of Buckland Beacon. This bulbous granite formation is one of the many tors that scatter this part of the moor and its horizontal wrinkles make excellent finger-holds if you enjoy climbing. In 1928 two slabs were painstakingly engraved with a set of the Ten Commandments; today these were unreadable, blanketed along with the winter-spindled heather. Only the larger, tougher birds were calling: the gravel-rasp of crows and distant, stately ‘cronk cronk’ of ravens echoed on the wind. Their shadows cast blue patterns against the snow. A solitary herring gull, blown in from the south coast, seemed to be playing on the freezing cauldron of air.

  Benji noticed them first: the tracks were pockmarked everywhere, the long-legged prints of hares, the large hind paws set ahead of the forepaws. Some human prints led to a wreath lain for the full moon (people are like that in Devon) and a mischievous snow sculptor had left us the best for last: not a full snowman, but pertinent parts of him, brazenly pointing to the sky.

  With heart-rending speed, by the afternoon it was all over. The thick hawthorn and beech hedges tinkled with drips and the roads ran with streams of snowmelt. We were still tingling with a whole season in one day when we were gifted with a new surprise: a russet knot tumbled in front of us, untied itself and shot across the road. The word formed in my mouth before I had time to think. Stoat. The long body snaked like a little flame with a smouldering tip – the stoat’s distinctive black-tipped tail. This feature, as well as its slightly longer length than the tinier weasel, confirmed its identity as one of Britain’s most voracious predators. The incisor teeth of this compact and muscular stealth-machine have evolved to fit perfectly between the upper vertebrae of a rabbit, enabling it to dislocate the neck in one quick bite. Even worse if you are a rabbit, the stoat deliberately performs a capoeira-like dance so fascinating that you forget your fear and cannot resist lingering a few doomed moments.

  This stoat was doing nothing but streaking away from us along the tarmac. As well as its creamy throat and underbelly I felt sure that some of its fur was flecked with white. Perhaps a residual winter coat? In the north they routinely grow snowy ‘ermine’ coats in winter to help them be camouflaged. But climate warming is causing these more northerly mustelids the same problems as other snow-animals: and it isn’t just the stoat who is suffering. Without regular snow, winter-white snow hares now stand out against the khaki and brown Cairngorm mountainsides and can be easily picked out by predators. Ermine stoats can also be seen by their prey as well as predators. If climate warming continues to eliminate prolonged snows from our winter season, what will become of us all, humans and animals?

  A new flurry arrived and we tipped o
ur heads back, eyes closed. I opened my mouth wide to catch the powdery flakes as they fell. I could barely feel them as they melted on my tongue.

  Wendy died in her sleep as I was finishing my story. With typical generosity, at the venerable age of 90, her heart failed, sparing herself and us the worst of a slow drawn-out decline into spreading cancer. When your family has been shaken and re-orientated, some things settle down, and new things arrive.

  Benji and I still have three European owls to see: the Snowy, the Hawk Owl and the elusive Great Grey: all of these we can see as captives in our local zoo, but it is the wild where they reside for me, and I know I will not be satisfied until we have at least been in search. When an email from an owl guide in northern Finland popped into my inbox, inviting me to go and see the northern owls that I had missed on my odyssey, I knew this journey was not quite over. In the New Year I would take Benji to see them in the wild. Hawk Owls were performing a record-breaking irruption – a southerly migration in search of food – due to very cold conditions, while Strix nebulosa, the Great Grey Owls, were hunting regularly, my contact told me. Both these owls could usually be watched from secret tracks and special hides deep in the forest of northern Finland. Very occasionally, a Snowy is seen in northern Lapland. These owls were a possibility, perhaps they could be within reach. The tough cookies I hadn’t yet seen in their natural habitat: we would make a trip to Lapland, travelling by train, hiring an eco-cabin and getting a guide to show us the Great Grey and the Hawk Owl hunting; perhaps there would be the possibility of a Snowy Owl. This trip will wait for when Benji is better, and I’ll take him with me. He does seem a little better. Something has shifted; he’s seen a new specialist and touch wood, for now he’s getting stronger and more confident in himself. As Emily Dickinson says: