The relative numbers of the different types of prey taken by any particular species of owl vary with the regular cycles of availability of each edible creature in their hunting territories. These cycles, which recur over a few consecutive years, also govern the breeding numbers of owls, and thus their own population density.
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Five species of owls are normally resident in mainland Britain: in descending order of population numbers, the Tawny, the Little, the Barn, and the Short-Eared and Long-Eared owls. Additionally, the great white Snowy Owl has been known to breed during summers spent in the Shetland Isles, but is otherwise only a winter visitor to Scotland from its sub-Arctic home ranges in Scandinavia. There are marked differences – in habitat, timetable of daily activity, and to a lesser extent in preferred prey – between the ecological niches occupied by the different species, and this allows them to co-exist without too much direct competition.
The Little and Barn owls have already been described briefly. The scarce and closely related Short-Eared and Long-Eared owls are not found in southern or eastern Britain, but mostly in the north and west. (Their ‘ears’ are in fact simply tufts of feathers on their heads that are used for recognition and signalling, and have nothing whatever to do with their actual ears.) The populations of both species are notoriously uncertain, but there may be about 3,500 breeding pairs of Short-Eared Owls in Britain (so slightly less than the Barn Owl population), and fewer than 1,000 pairs of Long-Eared. Both are migratory species, and in autumn and winter Scandinavian visitors increase the numbers of Short-Eared Owls. Birds that migrate seasonally are less solitary in their habits than those that stay close to home. Both these species are less territorial and – except in the breeding season – more gregarious than the solitary Tawny, Little and Barn owls. Small squadrons of Long-Eared Owls have been seen migrating from Scotland southwards and westwards in autumn, and groups of them will roost together in wintertime. So long as prey is plentiful, different pairs of Short-Eared Owls will tolerate each other when living quite small distances apart.
These two species are roughly similar in size and colouring, but very different in their habitats and ways of life. The Short-Eared are birds of open heath, grassland and marsh, which nest and spend much of their time on or close to the ground. With relatively long wings and lemon-yellow eyes, they hunt on the wing by day and at dusk. Long-Eared Owls are strictly nocturnal woodland birds, found particularly in conifer forests; they have relatively short, broad wings and orange eyes, and hunt on the wing along the edges of their home forest. Always sparse in numbers, but formerly found distributed over wide areas, in the twentieth century Long-Eared Owls suffered a marked decline in Britain. Simultaneously, an owl of similar size and colouring but much more adaptable habits began to extend its range into their territories: Strix aluco, the Tawny or Brown Owl.
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So much for the palaeontology and zoology; but what about the ‘sociology’ – historically speaking, how do we feel about owls?
Ancient cave paintings in France and other surviving images from around the world confirm that mankind’s conscious relationship with owls stretches back over tens of thousands of years, and they figure more often than any other bird in human myth and folklore. Puzzlingly, our feelings towards them have always been remarkably ambivalent: humans have felt respect for owls’ actual or imagined qualities, while simultaneously regarding them with superstitious dread.
The practical aspects of mankind’s interaction with owls have mostly been positive. Throughout most of our history we have not seen owls as competitors for food resources – indeed, we have recognized that they are actively helpful to us. Since the birth of agriculture some 10,000 years ago farming has overwhelmingly meant the cultivation of grain crops, and rodents have always been the scourge of the grain farmer – they plunder his harvest, foul his stored grain and spread disease. Being more versatile than cats, owls are Nature’s greatest killers of rodents, so having owls around the place was an unambiguous benefit for farmers. In parts of northern Europe you can still see both field perches deliberately provided for them, and traditional farmhouses built with pierced ‘owl-boards’ in the gables to encourage nesting Barn Owls, and in several of those countries folk wisdom has been reinforced by legal protection. (Historically, captive owls were also used by bird-catchers to lure ‘mobbing’ birds into nets, or on to nearby twigs smeared with gluey bird-lime.)
Nevertheless, superstition has influenced human attitudes towards owls much more powerfully than any commonsense recognition of their usefulness. On the positive side, in Western and some other cultures owls have been associated with wisdom (though interestingly, they have the opposite reputation in Indian folklore). Europeans have always been impressed by the owl’s serene stillness during daytime: our forebears assumed that anything that spends so much time sitting quietly and keeping itself to itself must be deep in thought – thus, the ‘wise old owl’, who watches everything but says nothing. The ancient Greeks associated the Little Owl, which is common in Mediterranean countries, with their warrior goddess of wisdom, Pallas Athene. Depictions and literary allusions to the goddess often included owl imagery, and since she was the tutelary deity of the city-state of Athens her Little Owl even appeared on some Athenian coins. Among more distant cultures from our own there were a few others that positively revered the owl, such as the Mongolians and Tatars. Some Native Americans believed that the souls of their medicine men passed into owls, and in southern Australia the aboriginal peoples regarded them as, specifically, the guardian spirits of women.
Since literacy and learning in medieval Europe were almost exclusively the province of the Church – and since owls often nested in church towers – owls became popularly associated with the clergy. A twelfth-century English allegory by one John of Guildford, The Owl and the Nightingale, mentions both Barn and Tawny owls – respectively, ‘the owl that scritchest’ and ‘the owl that yollest’. (When the author of the illustrated Ashmole Bestiary of the early thirteenth century comments on what is clearly a Barn Owl that it is ‘heavy with feathers, signifying superfluity of flesh and lightness of mind’, he is simply showing his ignorance; an owl’s flesh is anything but superfluous.) In the Arthurian myth cycle the wizard Merlin was supposedly accompanied by an owl sitting on his shoulder. The owl’s sedentary stillness, cloaked posture and big eyes surrounded by encircling feathers would later remind people of a bespectacled scholar or schoolmaster – respected for his learning, if mocked for his stuffy dignity and unworldliness.
In all superstitious societies, owls’ body parts have figured in the rituals and recipes devised to summon up ‘sympathetic magic’, and such beliefs ranged from the straightforward to the fanciful. It is easy to understand why Apache warriors in the American South-West decorated their war-caps with owl feathers, invoking the skills of silent, stealthy hunting. A rather more plonkingly literal approach persuaded several other peoples to eat owls’ eyes in the hope of improving their night vision. In Yorkshire, owl soup was supposed to cure whooping cough, and even in early modern times there was an English country superstition that feeding a child the egg of this ‘sober’ bird would protect it from growing up to become a drunkard. (Again, Indian folklore went its own way: in India, owl flesh was imagined to be an aphrodisiac.)
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The place occupied by owls in our folklore has reflected a confusion between respect and fear, but heavily skewed towards the latter. Unfortunately, the negative images of owls have always far outweighed the positive, and this is obviously due to their association with the night. Night-time for humans meant blindness and helplessness in the face of real or imagined terrors. Night was when ghosts and evil spirits walked abroad, and a creature that was specifically a master of the night must therefore be a consort of the dark powers.
Only a few centuries ago in Europe owls were one of the animals habitually supposed to be the devilish familiars of witches; for instance, the Book of the Days reporting the tria
l of the three ‘Belvoir witches’ in Leicestershire in 1618 has a woodcut including one of them, Joane Willimot, with an eared owl on her shoulder. This reputation as a witch’s accomplice was not simply a case of the owl providing an unwitting conduit for evil. It was argued that any bird that hid from the sunlight and was habitually ‘abused’ – that is, mobbed – by daytime birds must bear the curse of some ancient crime. The Old Testament lists the owl among the creatures to be abominated, and as the inhabitant of ruins it was also a dreary reminder of the vanity and decay of human hopes: ‘It shall never be inhabited … but wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there … And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof; and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls’ (Isaiah 13:20–21; 34:13).
By extension from its occult associations and its dark and eerie haunts, the owl became – above all others – the creature of ill omen, and the herald of misfortune and death. Oddly enough, while the Romans were great respecters of Greek culture, and identified Pallas Athene with their goddess Minerva, their feelings about her symbolic bird were overwhelmingly negative (although, by contradiction, images of owls were supposed to counter the evil eye). Pliny the Elder’s Natural Histories are a hilarious repository of utter nonsense about animals and the remedies to be derived from their body parts; his ignorance is exemplified by his belief that owls had defective vision, and his credulity about their malign supernatural power seems to have been widely shared. In his society, whose priests interpreted the behaviour of birds when studying the auspices before public decisions were made, ‘owl’ was already a slang term for a witch. An archaic translation of Pliny declares that ‘The scritch-owle betokeneth always some heavy news, and is most execrable and accursed in the presaging of public affairs.’ To Pliny, the owl was ‘the very monster of the night’, and the sight of one ‘foretells some fearful misfortune’ (though history does not record whether he heard one before his fatal boat trip to examine the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79).
Shakespeare echoes this Roman superstition in Julius Caesar, in which the dictator’s assassination is fore-shadowed by an unnatural daytime appearance: ‘… the bird of night did sit / Even at noonday, upon the marketplace, / Hooting and shrieking.’ He has Lady Macbeth call the owl the ‘fatal bellman, which gives the stern’st goodnight’. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream he writes that its ‘… scritching loud / Puts the wretch that lies in woe / In remembrance of a shroud’, and in Henry VI that ‘The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign’. A contemporary Austrian source describes the owl as ‘ein Totenvogel, Sinnbild der Sünde’ (‘a death-bird, symbol of sin’). Again in the sixteenth century, Edmund Spenser also calls it ‘death’s dreadful messenger’, and Robert Jones writes: ‘Come, doleful owl, the messenger of woe / Melancholy bird, companion of despaire.’ In fact, English poets from Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century (who called the owl ‘the prophete of wo and myschaunce’) right up to Edward Thomas and Laurie Lee in the twentieth have been shamefully negative about this innocent and useful bird. In 1808 Oliver Goldsmith went so ridiculously far as to call owls ‘nocturnal robbers’, and complained that to hunt by night was simply unsporting!
The belief that hearing an owl calling on the roof or even nearby was a sign of an impending death in the household (‘and sings a dirge for dying souls’ – Thomas Vautor, Sweet Suffolk Owl, c. 1600) seems to have been almost universal among country folk for many centuries, and presumably originated in the simple fact that most natural deaths occur at night. The Chinese went further and believed that owls actually snatched away the souls of the dying, while there was an Arab tradition that owls embodied the spirits of unavenged victims of murder, crying out for blood. (More prosaically, it seems that in Wales the owl’s cry foretold another event that usually happened at night: it was a warning that a maiden was about to lose her virginity.)
Much of this might seem to answer the belligerent demand that I recall making to somebody whose apparent disapproval of my own domestic arrangements was becoming irritating: ‘So, what have you got against owls anyway, chum?’ But I would naturally object that Mumble’s forebears suffered an undeservedly bad press, and even today her fellow owls may sometimes continue to be slandered, if for rather different reasons.
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In earlier times, when mankind came into direct contact with predatory carnivores that took their livestock and might threaten their children, there were good reasons for feeling hostility towards them. If you lived in a shack in a lonely forest clearing or depended upon your small flock for survival, you could be forgiven for not giving wolves or eagles the benefit of the doubt.
In modern times most of us have lost all instinctive understanding of the checks and balances of the natural world, to the extent that many people have become babyishly squeamish about the simplest facts of animal life. If the plastic-wrapped slab of supermarket meat has even become disconnected from the idea of a living cow, then it is not surprising that few people are aware of the indispensable role of predatory animals in the universal cycles of life. For instance, even those who enjoy an opportunity to see birds of prey on the wing may exclaim with prissy indignation about their ‘cruelty’ when they see one stoop for the kill, and imagine the muffled squeak of a small life ending.
In fact, of course, among the birds of prey owls may get something of a free pass in this respect; they look cuddly, they hide their killing talons under fluffy feathers, and they are out about their natural business only when most people are asleep. (The owls in the Harry Potter films are seen benignly carrying messages to the dining tables of Hogwarts – audiences are unlikely to give a thought to what they get up to at their own mealtimes.) Moreover, the almost complete urbanization of Western Europe has made actual encounters with wild owls fairly rare. Since most British people now live in towns and cities, they will never be startled by the silent, ghostly-white swoop and blood-curdling shriek of a patrolling Barn Owl.
However, the fading of religious belief certainly has not made us less susceptible to ghost stories. After dark, our rational minds cannot always protect us from folk memories about these haunters of ruins and graveyards who come as winged messengers of death and calamity. Even the much less alarming hoot of a Tawny Owl as they walk past a dark wood makes some people’s neck-hairs prickle if they are not accustomed to being out of doors in the countryside at night. That mournful-sounding call seems to reinforce feelings of loneliness, and of near-helplessness in a surrounding darkness that might hide the approach of unknown dangers.
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For obvious reasons, my own reaction to that sound has been very different ever since a Saturday afternoon in May 1978.
One summer, after Mumble had passed out of my life, a friend and I decided in a spirit of curiosity to try sleeping out in an ancient Hampshire yew wood that was notorious for being haunted. Supposedly, it is the site of the thousand-year-old mass grave of the victims of a battle between Vikings and West Saxons. I was told by somebody who had grown up near Chichester that local children used to dare each other to venture into it, and a botanical artist had told another friend of mine that she suffered a panic reaction when she walked through it after being caught out un expectedly late. Even the warden of the nature park in which this unusual concentration of yew trees grows – a thoroughly practical outdoorsman – has admitted in print that he avoids it as soon as the sun begins to dip below the horizon, claiming to be conscious of a sinister atmosphere under its dark eaves.
Despite this evil reputation, Will and I didn’t have much hope of experiencing anything interesting. Nevertheless, after an evening at the nearest pub we trekked in with sleeping bags and water bottles, and settled down among the ancient, riven trunks and the caves of ground-sweeping branches. Will, a long-time Territorial Army rifleman, efficiently scraped a small pit for his hipbone, slithered inside his ‘green slug’ and was gently sn
oring within minutes. Less accustomed to roughing it, I lay awake for a long while, listening to the breeze and the occasional faint patter of drizzle. My emotional antennae were consciously tuned to pick up any chilling sensations, but I was completely disappointed. As my eyes at last grew heavy there suddenly came, from about two trees away, the tremulous call of a Tawny Owl. I rolled over to sleep, comforted like a child and feeling foolish about the whole ghost-hunting exercise. In my world, nothing wicked could be abroad if there was a tawny nearby.
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The Stowaway on the Seventh Floor
SINCE IT WAS the last week of May 1978 when I collected ‘Marmite Sandwich’ from Water Farm as a fledgling roughly thirty days out of the egg, she must have hatched in late April. I decided that, like Her Majesty, my owl should have an official birthday. Because I have a connection with the British old comrades’ association of the French Foreign Legion, I took the entirely arbitrary decision to celebrate it on the auspicious 30 April – the Legion’s ‘Camerone Day’, when I would be at a party anyway.
My owl’s legal identity was ‘39 RAH 78 U’, stamped in black on a yellow plastic bangle worn discreetly around her feathery left ankle. The name ‘Mumble’ just came into my head after a few days of listening to her quiet conversations with herself, me and the world at large. (I must emphasize that this all happened about thirty years before a major American animation studio gave the same name to a fictitious penguin with showbiz ambitions. I have always been vaguely suspicious about that, but I don’t recall that anyone from Hollywood ever met my owl.)
The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar Page 5