by Rob Cowen
Turns out that sound is a pretty important part of the twelve-week scan. They don’t tell you that; the emphasis is always on what you see rather than hear, but the probe is a microphone too. Rachel leans forward, flips around the larger monitor and turns up the volume. The speakers cut in with a hollow cuurrrrrr – the static of a detuned radio or far-off industry, like the idling sewage works heard from the viaduct. Rosie’s grip on my hand tightens as the probe sits tail up in the air, nudging into her stomach. The sound becomes louder and punctuated by a quick, pounding, sluicing rhythm. A heartbeat: woosh-woosh-woosh-woosh. The whole thing is weirdly machine-like; I think of Second World War films when you can hear a ship’s propeller approaching from inside a submarine. On screen, the grainy silver-black sea resolves from owl into a little skin-skeletal shape lying horizontally with a pounding triangle in its centre, its weeny bone legs bent up to its chest.
‘Can you see the hands?’ Rachel asks as she highlights and zooms in. Not really, just a tiny, sleep-twitching fist covering the head in a boxing defence. Then it moves, shifting around onto its side as if trying to get comfortable in bed. This is what we will both remember: staring goofily at its incessant wriggling, a tiny quicksilver ghost messing up the bedclothes.
Along the hospital road, the white and pink cherry blossom is coming. There are spears of snowdrops in the gardens. I didn’t see them on the way there. The world smells cleaner. I confess to Rosie about seeing the owl in the ultrasound and she smiles. Later she says, ‘Why don’t we go down to the edge-land again? I’d like to hear the owls tonight.’
I am learning to value the tiny subtleties in times of day. The edge-land changes depending on when you arrive, but also how you arrive, almost who you are when you come here. The evening feels celebratory. The sun tints bare trees into fountains of gold, turning lone crows in their crowns into weathervanes, beaks spun round to the south-west. That long blurry fortnight of snow was blinding; now it’s as though I’ve have had my eyes tested and been prescribed stronger glasses. The skin of the earth looks grazed in patches, like a toddler’s knee; shoots of wheat push to the surface in a thin wash of green blood. Elder buds in the holloway are cracking open with tightly folded clusters of crimped, red-edged leaves. We walk quietly to the wood down a passageway brimming with momentum and trembling air. Rabbits have been digging new holes in the thawing ground, dredging deep terracotta earth and scattering it under a hazel. Silver catkins soften the dark stems of sallow. It isn’t even dark yet, but the male tawny owl is already broadcasting on long wave, calling high so his notes carry across the weir.
‘Listen!’ We hiss under our breaths, grabbing each other’s sleeves. He is less than ten feet away on the low branches of a pine, facing northwards, away from us.
You hear people talk about having ‘our song’, a tune with significance that they’ve claimed as their own. Something that became meaningful by chance, by coincidence. If it was the same with birds, ours would be an owl. A long-eared owl sang us home from one of our first dates – a night walk from pub to pub in the Lake District; resident male tawnies provided moonlight sonatas in the communal grounds of our first flat in London. Most impressive, though, was the snowy owl that gatecrashed our honeymoon. Taking a remote Cornish cottage in January for a few days seemed a sure way to get privacy, but one morning we looked through frosted windows to see the narrow lanes and fields choked with cars, binocular-browed twitchers and news crews. They had descended overnight from all over the country in the hope of catching sight of a rare visitor, a nomadic bird of the high Arctic that isn’t usually seen so far south. That white phantom haunted the copses and fields of the Zennor coast ‘like a decent-sized lamb in the trees’, as one local put it. But despite our best efforts and enviable position, we never saw her. Then one morning, ironically, as a curtain of snow approached from the west, owl and people vanished.
To get a better view tonight, we creep over pine needles and dead leaves but the tawny bores of our amateur stealth, turns and fixes us with a black-marble gaze. It feels like being caught by your parents secreting a girl into your bedroom. His ragged, dark-ringed face is fearless, frowning; his shaggy cryptic plumage blends perfectly with the bark of the tree. Tawnies roost by day but they love sunbathing and the warmth of evening light bronzes his feathers. We aren’t the only ones who’ve seen him. A great tit keeps its distance but performs elaborate flicks of wings and tail, firing rapid-note alarm calls. Daylight exposure is risky business for owls. The characteristic head and body shape is unique and, once recognised, mobbed. In times past, hunters covered trees with birdlime, stationing an owl decoy so that other birds would fly at it and became stuck. This is what the great tit’s dance moves are about, to marshal others to pester and pick at the predator until it moves away. I’ve seen this only once before in a woodland in Kent; mistle thrushes appeared and swarmed the top of a foliage-covered oak, as if grassing up the concealed female tawny within – She’s here, she’s here. Then came wave after wave of their sharp-beaked, full-frontal attacks. Few birds are so hated and feared by other birds. Even hawks are better tolerated. As Roman poet Ovid wrote of an owl: ‘She is a bird indeed … but conceals her shame in the darkness; and by all the birds she is expelled entirely from the sky.’1
Back before owls became a fixture in our fashions and furnishings, they weren’t much regarded by us, either. From biblical times, they were considered a winged harbinger of ill and the sign of darkness and ruin. In the words of Pliny the Elder, writing over 1,900 years ago: ‘He is the very monster of the night … if he be seen, it is not for good, but prognosticates some fearful misfortune.’2 This reputation probably stems from the owl’s tortured-sounding call and predilection for haunting ruined, abandoned tracts and buildings. But mud sticks. In the sixteenth century, Shakespeare reflected similar English folk beliefs in Macbeth: ‘It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman, which gives the stern’st goodnight.’3 Confusingly, though, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many communities and regions believed the opposite – that the owl was as much a forecaster of good and success as it was of evil. Hooting was said to foretell the birth of a girl; an appearance near the house of a pregnant woman was said to ensure an easy delivery or the birth of a boy. Here in Yorkshire it was once claimed that whooping cough was cured by a good bowl of ‘owl broth’ and numerous recipes suggest the bird’s eggs should be eaten for rude health. Farmers certainly appreciated their skills in keeping field and wood mice down. And there was a belief among certain Native Americans that the cry of the owl was its mournful remembrance of a golden age when men and nature lived in harmony. I like that tale the most – owl as balladeer forever lamenting the Garden of Eden.
But enough of this. It’s too much to carry on little shoulders. The tawny has no interest in our speculation and superstition. It is what it is. With a last look down, he tilts his face up to the dying light and then folds away, passing low and fast over the river.
March marches on. Rosie grows. Leaves fur the trees, save for one giant sycamore in the wood that is reluctant to join the party. I can follow its naked shape from the faint feathery top down to its exposed roots. Doing so is akin to tracing the course of a mighty river on a satellite photograph; every branch is a tributary, each bursting bud at twig’s end a rising spring. It could be the Nidd, frozen, black and hauled upright. Nearby, about thirty metres from the weir, is an old beech where I’m sure the owls must be nesting, high up in a rotted hole between two great branches. The entrance is well concealed with ivy but if I listen long enough in the dark the male appears to circle from this spot in long, extending sorties. Borders are policed by his regular screeching checks that make me jump when near and at the limit of their territory become the soft, whistling high notes of wind in a chimney flue.
The male is increasingly hunting by day now, proffering gifts of what I assume must be voles, rabbits and mice to his brooding mate. I’ve bought a pair of binoculars to carry with me and raided my mother’s ol
d birding guides for more information. They recommend determining diet by searching for the owl’s ‘pellets’, the disgorged bone and fur of its prey that act as a kind of food diary. It’s easier said than done and an effort to find anything in the decaying ground layer of last year’s leaves and emerging forests of dog’s mercury, wood anemone, lesser celandine and ramsons. Even so, the searching is an education. Winter still holds the edge-land’s hollows but everywhere else incidental riches grow, new life through the garlic-smelling earth. There are carpets of bonsai-like nettles and cleavers growing in perfect miniature. Marsh marigolds’ golden cups cluster in the streams and little waterlogged culverts near the river. I have a five-minute staring competition with a young wood mouse as it emerges from under a rock two metres away. It is unperturbed until I reach for my phone to take a photograph. I must be the first human it has seen.
It is about 5 p.m. judging by the rush-hour rumble and horns on the roads from the south and, across the river, the boom and clatter of metal as arable machinery trundles back to barns. Shadows are lengthening and there’s the rusty cook-cook of a pheasant and twittering robins. The male tawny is alone on the edge of the wood, perched on the wrist of an oak’s long, thick limb. There’s enough mustard light to use the binoculars and, in the natural hide of the holloway, I prop my elbows on a low branch and take in the details of his muted and mottled cream and chocolate feathers. They have an unbelievable smoothness, like a luxury truffle, the sort you buy in those twirling seashell shapes. He moves his head mechanically, rotating that facial disc like a satellite.
Actually, the more you read about a tawny owl’s hearing, the more sci-fi it all feels. Their ears are roughly ten times more sensitive than ours and able to detect low-frequency nuanced sounds over considerable distance, even those as subtle as the rustlings of prey moving through vegetation. I say ‘ears’, but they’re actually two openings positioned asymmetrically either side of the face hidden by feathers that have adapted to be ‘transparent’ to sound waves. The left opening is positioned higher than the right, which points downward to improve the owl’s sensitivity to noises from below. All sound coming from beneath its line of sight is therefore louder in its right ear. Running through the skull and linking the two eardrums is a passage packed with auditory neurons that tell the brain the fractional differences in the times of arrival of sounds to each ear. Instantly translating this data – right, left, up, down – the owl precisely maps and pinpoints the source.
Then he falls off the branch like he’s been shot and I lose him in my glasses. Lowering them and squinting, I catch a brown blur plummeting towards the field and rush to fix them on him again. It’s all so swift and silent; his wing feathers serrated like a comb to eliminate any flying noise. His head stays perfectly still, his spectacular vision is now locked-on but, mid-flight, perhaps only five feet from the ground, he makes a correction and banks left, bringing his feet forward and extending his talons, swooping his wings down as though he means to smother the prey for good measure. The moment of the strike is lost in the dwarf wheat but I watch as he immediately bobs his head in a series of flinging, violent blows. My heart is in my throat. Then, after a minute, the owl looks around nonchalantly and rises, carrying off the crumpled grey ball of a baby rabbit. A life ended before it has begun; a stomach fed. All the while the pheasant and robins continue with their idle chit-chatting. Nothing sees; nothing cares. The hunt, the death, all of it seems so shockingly routine.
Later I come home to find Rosie opening a letter from the hospital confirming the date for our twenty-week ultrasound scan. As she jots the date in the calendar, I read the much-photocopied NHS literature explaining how it all works, how the probe sends high-frequency sound (1 to 5 megahertz) into the body and listens to the echoes that return. Apparently the sound waves hit the boundaries between fluid and flesh or muscle and bone. Some bounce back to the probe; others travel further to be reflected by another boundary. Perched on the belly, the probe hears the millionths-of-a-second frequency differences between them and using the equation of the speed of sound in tissue (1,540 metres per second) the machine processes and resolves the distances, mapping the body’s internal landscape in a two-dimensional image. The leaflet also carries a word or two of caution. The more detailed investigation is also known as the anomaly scan. You find out if all those boundaries, bones and bits of flesh are behaving properly. ‘The ultrasound occasionally detects some serious abnormalities,’ it warns at the bottom, ‘so you should be prepared for that information.’
Again, so routine.
The anatomical and emotional changes in women during pregnancy are well known and documented, but impending parenthood alters a man too. There’s a lot less said about that, but I’m feeling it already. The skin becoming thinner and more sensitive, the world even more glorious and cruel.
The week is crashing out with the vindictiveness of an army laying waste to the ground. A wet storm-wind shrieks from the west into the edge-land across miles of hill and farmland. It tells of wars being fought and battles approaching. ‘This is unbearable,’ shouts a lady buffeted from car to front door as her umbrella leaps from her grasp and vanishes over a hedge.
The gales are strong enough to drive leaves from the wood all the way up Bilton Lane like scuttling refugees heading for the safety of town. I head in the opposite direction, passing the crossing point before slipping left over the little ford and up the lane. There is nobody else here and the trees usher me away with frantic gestures. The wrong way! You’re going the wrong way! A swirling acrid wind makes it hard to breathe and look in any direction for long and I envy the rabbits and voles huddled now in burrows. A coal tit crashes into a holly looking for protection; I seek shelter too, running for the holloway as shouts and moans howl through its hazel walls. By the wood an ash flails and I wrap my arms around its trunk to stay upright. The whole place is in distress. Canopies throb and merge as pines roar their anguish over the river. To escape the barrage of debris and air I wedge myself between two pine stumps. It is at once terrifying and invigorating, as if I am looking up from the ocean floor as a tsunami passes overhead. But if I kneel I can just about see the owl’s tree and follow its swaying trunk with the binoculars. Chances are the female tawny is inside nesting. It worries me. Wind and rain smashing and percolating through woodland destroys an owl’s ability to use sound, making hunting extremely difficult, and the pair must be hungry. Regardless, the field guides confirm she will be incubating between two and five white eggs, each laid a week apart. Weather or no weather, life goes on.
The wind pitches louder, higher like a dynamo being wound into a scream and a trunk falls somewhere. A quick look over the parapet; it’s not the owls’ tree, but how long until it is? In the darkening underworld of the forest floor I feel the thin line between life and death running like a fault below me. Still, I stay put out of some sense of fatherly solidarity. It’s just nature, though, I tell myself, whatever happens. Then, from nowhere, a rising tide of emotion hits me and I find I’m thinking of my friend Peter who died unexpectedly, unnecessarily, in an accident seven months ago. I feel the same slow soul-sadness I’ve experienced regularly since answering the 2 a.m. call from his cousin, an unreal mix of helplessness and incomprehension. Then that yawning absence. Like touching an electric fence, it’s the sudden jolt of finding yourself at the margins where human and nature step outside the neat categories we give them, those moments when we’re suddenly forced to confront the non-negotiable fine print of our existence. These are the other moments when we hear the undetectable frequencies and unforgettable sounds, like on the night I heard about Peter: the crack in his cousin’s voice and, after I’d told her, Rosie’s repeated ‘Oh no’, a trembling hand half-covering her mouth.
Out here in the edge-land, transformation is in everything. With a million life-and death-moments happening each millisecond, you never escape the sense of shifting states. I know the water I can hear crashing over the weir is destined to become open sea an
d although it will no longer be ‘river’, it will still exist. And one day it will be resurrected into rain again. It’s just the same with the baby rabbit and the owl. Energy never runs out, it only changes from one form to another. It can’t be created or destroyed. Every joule hurtling past me was present at the beginning and will be there at the end. There’s consolation in that, for sure, but try telling it to the dad pacing a hospital corridor as his baby is operated on for congenital heart failure. This is the problem with ‘nature’: it is ambivalent to what makes humans tick. And yet it is what makes us tick. The two can be hard to reconcile sometimes.
For three nights I have vivid dreams of being in a crow’s nest on a raging sea. Our house crashes, woos and roars as the air screams around it, like some Victorian machine pushed to its limit. But now the pangs and pings outside sound like the engine is finally cooling and contracting.
As soon as I can, I run down to the wood, dodging the broken sticks, plastic bags and fast-food cartons still skidding under cars and over pavements. Garden conifers suddenly strain and roar. A screeching call of distress sounds from a garden by the crossing point, like a blackbird trapped by a cat’s claw. Hurrying to the gate I see a car in a drive with its bonnet up, a man wedged sideways underneath in mucky overalls. He catches my look of surprise before turning back to the real source of the noise, a faulty ignition.