The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar

by Windrow, Martin

  * * *

  I covered sheets of graph paper with scribbles before a satisfactory blueprint emerged. Since the balcony was small, and the door led out to it end-on, the planned creation could not be more than 2 feet wide if it was to leave space for me to squeeze out there past the nearside end of it, but there was room for it to be 6 feet long by 6 feet high. I planned a complete plywood section at the far end, about the size of a telephone kiosk, incorporating a hutch into which Wellington could retreat when he was feeling unsociable (which seemed to be his default setting), with a perch just outside his ‘doorstep’ and a shelf for him to eat on. The rest of the structure was to be of wire mesh on a timber frame, with a couple more perches, made from branches, slanting across the corners at different heights.

  I am emphatically not a handyman, but I thought that the door I devised was a stroke of genius almost worthy of an approach to the Patent Office. The Windrow Mark 1 Double-Reciprocating Owl Valve was made of mesh on wooden frames matching the inner dimensions of the cage, and was mounted towards the nearer end of its long ‘front’ side. It was in fact a two-layer door with the layers set back to back and hinged together, one layer opening inwards and one outwards. All I had to do was make sure that Wellington was down at the far end of the cage before pulling a wire to close the inner layer of the door across its width, shutting him down there. I could then pull open the outer layer, enter, and close it behind me, thus shutting myself inside an ‘owl lock’. There was just enough room in there for me to swing the inner door back past me again, leaving me and Wellington in the same space, without his ever having had less than one door between him and the open air. I would then get him into a basket, and reverse the process to carry him indoors with me.

  Flushed with triumph, I set out on the Saturday morning to the local do-it-yourself store. This had everything that I needed, but there were one or two aspects that I had not thought through – principally, the difficulty of manoeuvring eight 6-foot lengths of 1-inch by 2-inch timber, three enormous sheets of marine-quality plywood (nothing but the best for Wellington), and sundry rolls of wire mesh through a narrow checkout exit, all balanced on a flimsy supermarket trolley. Act Two of this comedy of cruelty took place in the car park, where I faced getting it all into or secured on top of my car. (‘Mummy, why does the funny red-faced man with the bleeding hands keep breaking bits of string and saying rude words?’)

  At noon, calmed by cool beer and the lack of a human audience, I laid everything out on the living-room floor and set to work. My plan was to make each side, each end and the top separately, before juggling them out on to the balcony for final assembly. The scheme was sound enough, but the next thirty-six hours cruelly exposed my limitations as an entirely self-taught carpenter. Every measurement I had taken turned out to be that vital half-inch too short or too long. Every snipped end of wire mesh managed to stab my palm. Every staple bent uselessly as I tried to hammer it into the cheap, knotty wood. The hinge-screws split the timber, and at about 1am on the Sunday morning I discovered that I was missing three of the necessary angle-brackets.

  By Sunday evening I was dumb and savage with fatigue, and coated with sweat and sawdust, while the living-room floor looked like a building site – but there, by God, it stood at last. It glowed a mellow gold under its coats of weatherproof varnish, its Double-Reciprocating Owl Valve worked as if pivoting on silk and graphite, and its floor was lagged with snowy newspaper – a veritable owl-palace. Wellington was duly installed, the picture of haughty ingratitude. Hardly had I poured another beer and sat down before the doorbell rang. It was Attila the Caretaker.

  He and I had been distinctly wary of one another ever since my moving-in party many years before. All too conscious that Wellington blatantly breached a term of my lease, I summoned up my courage and prepared to make the opening address for the defence. After what I had been through that weekend I was insanely prepared to resist the oppressors to the High Court and beyond, but – to my astonished relief – there was no word of illicit livestock. It seemed that the trouble arose from another overlooked schedule or sub-clause of the lease, which forbade me to keep anything on the balcony that visibly lowered the tone of the apartment block. Since my balcony overlooked a gasworks, set among depressing terraced streets of two-up, two-down houses that were due to be demolished within the year, it was hard to imagine what I would have to do to genuinely spoil the aesthetics of the area. Nevertheless, the caretaker bluntly required me to move my ‘cupboard’, sharpish. In my relief that he had not investigated further, I promised to co-operate.

  Early the next morning I slipped down for a street-level reconnaissance. After lurking around several corners at varying distances and angles from the block, I discovered that the top part of the cage was indeed visible, but only at ranges of 150 yards and more. It was almost entirely hidden by the balcony parapet and the cave-like shadow cast by the balcony above mine, and only the fine, glowing colour of the shelter at the end caught the eye. Sighing for my three coats of carefully brushed marine varnish, I mooched off to buy half a gallon of matt black paint. By lunchtime a second recce had reassured me that Wellington’s quarters were now completely invisible from ground level. Since the regime did allow plantings on the balconies, I also invested in a fast-growing Russia vine and a bucket of compost. Within weeks this provided Wellington with a second layer of camouflage, and I would hear no more from the landlord’s apparatchik.

  * * *

  A couple of weeks later the problem of laying in rations for my owl became acute. I had found the number of a reasonably local hatchery and confirmed that they could sell me a sack of chicks, but I would have to turn up to collect them early in the morning before the pig-swill man arrived to take the lot. Since I was chasing deadlines at work too hard to take a morning off, that meant I could only fetch them on a Saturday. By the Tuesday I had only a couple of chicks left, and emergency measures were called for.

  Presumably, I thought, Wellington could be tempted by some other sort of meat, so long as it was bloody, cut up small, and came complete with the fur or feather roughage that his digestive system demanded. What about raw rabbit – surely that was suitably rural? I remembered from my childhood that autumn was the time when one saw rows of shot rabbits hanging up outside butchers’ shops, with tin cups under their muzzles to catch any dripping blood. In London the place for all kinds of specialist food suppliers servicing the restaurant trade was Soho, and that was only a ten-minute stroll from my office in Covent Garden. That lunchtime I walked over and began searching for an old-fashioned butcher selling game au naturel. The hunt was in vain; modern city taste apparently frowned upon such stark reminders of where meat actually comes from.

  By the following day I was getting worried, and decided to look further afield. It was a long-established legend that Harrods department store in Knightsbridge could supply anything that the heart desired, and the Harrods food hall was famous. I took a long lunch break and rode the Tube westwards. When I entered the hushed, high-ceilinged temple to gastronomy and found my way to the butchers’ counters, sure enough, there was a row of rabbits hanging neatly against the marbled wall. They even had a well-mannered look, in keeping with their surroundings.

  I had been so fixated on my target, and was so relieved to see it, that I had not actually thought out what I would say until I was approached by one of the staff. He was a silver-haired gentleman, impeccably dressed and aproned, with the quiet dignity of a bishop.

  ‘And how can I help sir today?’

  ‘I’d like a rabbit, please.’

  ‘Certainly, sir. Would sir be requiring a farmed or a wild rabbit?’

  ‘Umm … What’s the difference?’

  (Very slightly pitying look:) ‘Generally, sir, it is believed that farmed rabbits are larger and more tender, but wild rabbits have more flavour.’

  ‘Er … A farmed one will be fine.’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’ The bishop turned and unhooked one of the furry corpses behin
d the counter. ‘And sir would like this skinned, no doubt?’

  ‘Oh, umm – no, no thanks – leave the skin on, would you?’

  ‘Of course, sir.’ He began to wrap the rabbit. But then I remembered, from occasional shooting forays from Water Farm, just what it took to actually dismember a rabbit from scratch – and I realized that I didn’t have any knives in my own lazy bachelor’s kitchen that would be strong enough for the job. This was going to be embarrassing.

  ‘Umm – I say – er, could you possibly chop it up for me? With the fur on, I mean? Into fairly small chunks?’

  The bishop stood quite still, his glossily shaven features expressionless, and gave me a long look. Speaking rather slowly and deliberately, he asked:

  ‘So sir would like me to cut up this rabbit – on the bone – unskinned – into chunks …?’

  ‘Yes – yes, would you, please? … Umm – it’s not for me, you see.’ I was about to explain who it was for when my nerve failed me.

  With his back to me, he proceeded to do as I asked. In long years of service to a demanding public, this, I imagine, may have been a first for him. As his cleaver rose and fell, one of his fellow prelates was busy at the marble cutting-top next to him. I saw their heads move together. A moment later the other butcher stole a quick, inscrutable glance at me over his shoulder. The minutes seemed very long before I could thrust a banknote over the counter and make my self-conscious escape. It would be some months before I dared return.

  * * *

  I never did find out if Wellington actually ate much of his painfully acquired rabbit. He certainly wouldn’t touch his bunny-chunks during our next couple of frustrating evening sessions, so I had to leave bits of them in the balcony cage when I put him out for the night. He may have deigned to try them when he was alone, or he may have kicked them into a corner of his hutch with a hiss of contempt. That Saturday I bought several months’ worth of dead chicks, and had to empty my small freezer cabinet to pack them away. (And yes – on one occasion a guest seeking ice cubes for her gin and tonic did make a startling discovery.)

  The weeks of autumn turned into winter, and almost every evening Wellington and I continued our battle of wills as I persevered in trying to tame him. The sign I had hoped for was the classic indication that a bird has decided you are nice to be near: fluffing up his feathers, standing on one leg and taking a nap on your fist. Avril’s Tawny Owl, Wol, spent most of his life in this pose. Even Dick’s falcons, who were a right bunch of knife-fighters, would only simper sleepily while he stroked their breast feathers. But at my gentlest touch Wellington went rigid, and launched himself into a manoeuvre known in the trade as ‘bating off’.

  When a spooked bird takes it into its head to be upset about something, it will leap into the air to the full extent of the jesses and leash, and then fall until it is hanging upside down from your hand, projecting a sulky refusal to play any constructive part in the proceedings. Wellington was in no pain or discomfort; he could perfectly well get back up by himself with a single beat of his wings – as he would rapidly demonstrate if he ever fell off a perch by accident. But no; there he hung, twisting gently by his ankles, wings half open, and obstinately refusing to see reason. When you are not used to this behaviour it naturally seems alarming – you are concerned that the bird may injure itself. When you have picked it up and sat it back on your fist twenty times in an hour, only to be rewarded with another kamikaze dive, you tend to get irritable. If you give up and put the dratted creature back on its perch, you lose ten points.

  With effortless ease, Wellington invariably beat me at this game. He was not going to take food from my hand; he was not going to let me stroke him; he was not even going to sit on my fist for more than a moment at a time. As a creature designed by evolution for solitary hunting by means of untiring watchfulness, he had infinite resources of patience. I – being designed to catch my dinner by dashing around the savannah with my mates, in a state of noisy excitement – did not.

  * * *

  During that winter of 1977–78 I had to go away for a week-long business trip, and Dick kindly agreed to put Wellington up in a vacant aviary while I was away. When I returned and rang to arrange a trip to collect him, Dick’s voice was apologetic. He told me that while I was away Wellington had found a chink in a corner of the mesh, and had escaped into the night.

  My response to this news was distinctly mixed. I was sorry to have given Dick reason to worry; but at the same time, I was frankly relieved at being freed from a failing project without actually having had to make a decision. It would have been ridiculous to claim that I was fond of Wellington. He had been a prisoner and I his jailer; after about four months we had achieved no other relationship, nor was there any hint that we ever would. There was nothing for it but to write the whole thing down to experience, and get on with my life.

  In the event, it didn’t turn out like that. As the weeks passed, the lack of focus to my evenings at home became faintly disagreeable. The empty cage on the balcony – in front of my eyes outside the office window whenever I sat down at the typewriter – was a frequent reproach. My original wish to own and tame a bird of prey had been dampened but not quenched, and I couldn’t help brooding about the gap between what I had wanted to achieve and what had actually happened. During the family Christmas holiday at Water Farm the benign and fluffy presence of Wol, calmly presiding over the festivities from his shaded perch high up in a corner of the kitchen, was a constant reminder. In the New Year, I admitted to myself that I still wanted an owl. But what sort of owl?

  * * *

  After Wellington, I didn’t want another Athene noctua, but there would be little problem in acquiring a Barn Owl – Tyto alba (of which there are many more in captivity these days than in the wild, some of them birds rescued after being injured). The Barn Owl is the glamour-puss of TV natural history programmes, which seem to queue up to film them inside nesting boxes. The Latin name means White Owl; in Britain it is sometimes also known as the Screech Owl, from the blood-chilling shriek that occasionally scares the pants off night-time dog-walkers in the countryside. (In America this is the name of a different species.) Obviously, it takes its everyday name from its habit of nesting in farm buildings and setting up a mutually beneficial hunting territory in farmers’ yards and fields.

  The Barn Owl’s stiffly heart-shaped face gives it a haughty look of self-conscious dignity, and its magnificent golden-buff and white plumage dusted with dark speckles makes it highly visible (sometimes startlingly so, given its silent, ghostly approach) as it quarters its territory during hunting patrols both by night and in daylight. These photo genic looks, coupled with its precarious population numbers, make it the poster-owl for conservationists, and its flexible daily timetable and willingness to live close to humans are convenient for wildlife photographers and film-makers. But beautiful and graceful though the Barn Owl undoubtedly is, I must confess that I have never really warmed to it emotionally, and, while it thrives in aviaries, the books told me that it seldom makes a satisfactory house-pet.

  The Tawny Owl – Strix aluco – studiously avoids people with film cameras and PhDs, and lives a much more private life than Tyto alba. It does not patrol on the wing, is much less tolerant of humans nearby, and spends most of its time sitting motionless and camouflaged in woodland trees. Logically, it should therefore seem a more remote and less sympathetic creature, but human sentimentality doesn’t work that way. When confronted with a tawny, it would surely take a heart of stone not to feel the urge to cuddle it. It is well known that humans instinctively respond most warmly to animals (especially young ones) with soft fur or feathers, and faces in the place that we expect to see them. This ‘aaah … factor’ is, of course, just sentimental anthropomorphism, but its force is so undeniable that it seems pointless to fight it.

  We identify with owls because they have an upright stance and a recognizable face. Tawnies also have a rounder head than Barn Owls, and a rounder facial disc that is more so
ftly delineated and less aristocratic. Their dark eyes are relatively larger, and, unlike those of Barn Owls, are not widely separated by a smooth, vertical ridge of protruding feathers. Instead, a widow’s peak of short, contrast-coloured feathers growing down from the ‘forehead’ seems to cut the upper edge of the facial disc into two ‘eyebrows’. We automatically perceive the short, hooked bill as a ‘nose’, and the corners of the mouth are hidden by a broad triangle of ‘whiskers’.

  Watch a tawny for any length of time, and the subtle movements of the tiny, dense feathers covering its face give it what we perceive as a more expressive appearance than the rigid, heart-shaped mask of the Barn Owl. These changes do not, of course, have any real correlation to human facial expressions of emotion, but they look as if they should do – in the same way that a panting dog can look as if it is grinning. In repose, hunkered down and fluffed up into the shape of a cottage loaf, tawnies have a contentedly sleepy, comfortable look, and their brown and off-white plumage gives an illusion of being softer than that of the sleeker-looking Barn Owl. And finally, the tawny has the reputation of making a happy pet.