Despite this clear evidence that my owl was now – perhaps rather belatedly – fully in the grip of the adult instinct to defend her hunting and nesting territory, I confess that I remained briefly in denial. That came to an abrupt end soon afterwards, on a day when my friend Bella visited. The former Mumble had been happy to accept at her hands a certain amount of ‘coochie-coochie-coo’, and this time Bella reached up to her on the door top as usual. Mumble immediately dropped on her head like a feathery brick, all talons extended. As I checked her scalp for cuts, Bella let me know – with the directness proper to her birthright in the Northern Caucasus – how she felt about this treachery on the part of something that she had previously regarded as an animated fluffy toy.
The lesson was clear, and final. Mumble was no longer an unpredictable but generally adorable pet to be shown off and shared, but a grown, territorial, dangerous and strictly one-man bird. From that day until the end of her life I could never allow anyone but myself in the same room with her. Many years later Dick and I performed an experiment (with protective headgear for him). My brother and I are superficially alike – similar in height and general build, both bearded – and as an experienced falconer he projects no nervousness when he is around birds of prey. We spent time together in the same room as her un covered night cage so that she could get used to him. As soon as I opened the cage she attacked Dick, but then allowed me to handle her to put her away again. Whatever bond she and I had, it was between us alone.
* * *
I occasionally relented over my rule about never letting Mumble into my bedroom or office. The bedroom was the only place where I had a large enough wall mirror in good enough light to attempt to photograph her sitting on my shoulder. Since the room had very little space for anything other than the double bed and a chair, and offered neither attractive perches nor a window view any different from that in the living room, she normally showed little interest in it.
The exception was the first occasion when I happened to be changing a duvet cover while she was free in the flat. That always awkward exercise was doubly so in this very confined space, and was physically impossible without leaving the bedroom door open. When Mumble caught sight of me struggling with the billowing cotton she naturally interpreted it as a new game invented entirely for her amusement. Given her obsession with holes and tunnels, it was inevitable that the large, contorted bag of the half-replaced duvet cover would attract her at once. At the first opportunity she swooped down and scurried inside it; then, whooping like a Comanche, she tried to force her way down to the furthest corner, between the duvet’s interestingly squidgy surface underfoot and the thin, translucent tent resting lightly on her head and back. It was some time before I could extract her and banish her to the kitchen, and not before her claws had left their mark on the bedclothes.
Like any fond parent, I found it hard to apply the rules consistently, and in a weak moment one day when I was working at home I let her come into the office with me. (There was always a temptation to expose her to some new experience, simply for the interest of watching how she reacted.) I can’t recall that first occasion exactly, but I suppose she was being particularly delightful one morning, and I simply thought: Oh, what the hell – what harm can it do? Of course, once I had first weakened I did so again; I soon lost all moral authority, and Mumble found the office a much more interesting space than the bedroom.
It was large but dimly lit, with my desk under the window at the end looking out on to the balcony and her cage. It had another large built-in wardrobe with a sliding door, just like the one she enjoyed so much in the hallway, though this one was mostly full of old military uniforms. There were stacks of bookshelves along the other walls and in a free-standing pier, and in the corner was a life-sized dummy wearing Foreign Legion parade kit. (To my relief, Mumble apparently found the large green-and-scarlet epaulettes on its shoulders uncomfortable as perches – these collector’s items, the gift of a veteran, had survived two wars, and I didn’t want them splashed with owl-crap.) The wardrobe and bookshelves offered many intriguing crannies where she could creep between and behind things, and when she came into the office she generally didn’t flit around for long before finding herself a nice dim den to settle in. She was no trouble while I was editing typescripts with a pen; the problems started when I began typing.
To the digital generations who are too young ever to have seen one in action, I should perhaps explain that a manual typewriter with metal keys made a much louder clacking noise than the plastic keyboard of a computer. Moreover – and crucially, in this context – a sheet of paper was tucked around a cylindrical carriage mounted across the top of the machine, which moved steadily from right to left as the keys were struck. When you got to the end of each line of type the carriage stopped with a slight chiming noise, and you automatically reached up with your left hand to a lever on the end of the carriage and slammed it hard back to the right again, which rotated it to the next line space. To summarize, this device had a sheet of paper waving out of it, made a rhythmic noise, and was in constant movement from side to side, punctuated by chimes and exciting rushes ending in a crashing sound. What more could an adventurous young owl possibly desire?
The first time Mumble decided to investigate she came from behind me, hurling herself into the machine talons first and with wings upraised, as if she were jumping into a potted plant (a favourite game of hers). I’m a fairly fast typist, and when I am writing I concentrate hard, so when she arrived at speed in the central well of the machine she got a couple of key-taps under the tail before I could react. She found the rise and fall of the long keys under her feet intolerable, especially at a moment when she was trying to concentrate on biting the paper in front of her face, so things got a bit flappy and indignant before she was back on a bookshelf, thoroughly disgruntled.
Anybody would think that this would have put her off, but she was nothing if not obsessive in her interests. The sideways progress of the attractively waving sheet of paper proved irresistible, so she simply had to figure out an approach that kept her free of the annoying thrashing of the keys. This did not take much ingenuity, and before long she was landing from in front of me, directly on to the end of the carriage beside the paper. The first few times she did this I stopped typing and shooed her, chittering, off the machine. That only made her more determined, and she stubbornly returned again and again, until I lost patience and ejected her from the office.
We repeated this battle of wills on numerous occasions, and she made progress. I would keep right on typing, and after she got used to it she found that she enjoyed riding the carriage along its right-to-left track. This was apparently exciting enough, and she usually gave up her attempts to savage the paper. Naturally, every time I slammed the carriage back to the right she jumped into the air, but she soon learned to hover for half a second until its crashing arrival at the end of the track, and then descended on to it again for the next ride. I won’t pretend that I got much copy written while she was playing this game, and after a while I had either to distract her or banish her. Any sane person would simply have stopped allowing her into the office, ever; but I must confess that I found the spectacle of her riding the carriage rather endearing, and I never could bring myself to impose a permanent ban.
* * *
Mumble continued to take an intelligent interest in the written word, and when I was sitting reading with a newspaper on my lap she might suddenly arrive out of nowhere, landing in the middle of it with a crash and happily kicking holes in it. When I was lying on the sofa she would sometimes land unexpectedly on my chest and walk up to my face, to investigate my beard. One summer evening I was stretched at my ease with a book propped on my chest; Mumble was off about her own concerns somewhere, and I was completely absorbed in my reading. Suddenly, and absolutely without warning, she landed heavily in the narrow space between book and face. My protest left my brain as ‘Good GRIEF, Mumble!’, but reached my ears as ‘F’noog F’NEEF, Unguh!’
, since her fluffy front was pressing hard against my mouth. She apparently construed the resultant burst of warm air up her petticoats as a physical liberty, because she bent forwards and carefully bit me on the bridge of my nose.
In the autumn of 1979, when she was about eighteen months old, I noted an unwelcome change in Mumble’s habits. Sometimes, instead of (or after) sitting on my shoulder, she would take up position on top of my head. I suppose that the attraction was extra height and superior all-round visibility, which was fair enough; but it involved the frequent shuffling around of sharp claws to adjust her balance, and the subsequent take-off kicks could be quite painful.
Specific occasions when she chose to do this included any time when I used the telephone in the hallway. This seemed to provoke in her a positively childish competition for my attention. She might be sitting at a window gazing serenely over the roofscape, or dozing contentedly on top of a door; but if the phone rang, or I dialled out, then within a moment she would arrive on my scalp. She would squeak peevishly, pecking downwards at the handset or my ear, and then jump to the crook of my arm and try to bite through the dangling spiral cable. Callers who were ignorant of my domestic arrangements sometimes found the resulting three-way conversation confusing. I hesitated to share with them the fact that I was conducting it with an owl sitting on my head, for fear that the more conventionally minded clients might think such behaviour unprofessional.
* * *
I had always left Mumble a shallow water dish in her balcony cage, knowing from Avril’s experience with Wol that owls enjoy the occasional bath. She seemed to do this at least once a week, though it was hard to be sure. The first time I saw her doing it she reminded me of a human getting into a bath of uncertain heat. She stood for a few seconds on the rim of her dish, then stepped down into it with dainty caution, one foot at a time. She thought about things for a moment, standing with the water halfway up her lower legs; then she slowly settled downwards and forwards into it, until she was lying on her front with the water now halfway up her sides. She fluffed her feathers out a bit, wriggled and did a few gentle push-ups, waggling her tightly folded wings slightly. She kept these furled up, but then began clapping them against her sides more vigorously while ducking her face down into the water and up again, splashing droplets up and over her back. After several of these wing-waggling sessions she lay still for a while, obviously enjoying her soaking. Then she clambered to her feet and stepped carefully out, to begin the lengthy process of shaking herself dry and grooming her feathers.
This interest in water extended to times when she was free in the flat. When I was washing dishes in the kitchen sink she would sometimes fly to my shoulder, looking down with apparent fascination at my hands splashing among the suds and plates in the washing-up bowl. She was clearly trying to decide whether or not to jump down there and join in the action, but she never quite nerved herself to do it. However, on one really adventurous bath night it became apparent that she had been keeping her eyes open until I left water in the otherwise empty bowl.
I was relaxing in the living room that evening, not thinking about what she was getting up to, when I heard a flopp! like a soaking-wet dishrag falling on the lino floor of the kitchen. As I looked across to the kitchen door, something appalling came waddling slowly into view. Mumble had clearly been right under the water, and for some time, because her head was as completely soaked as the rest of her body. A longer beak than I had ever seen, and a pair of madly staring eyeballs, were sticking far out to the front of a tiny head covered with a thin Goth hairstyle of long black spikes (‘Baby! I hardly recognized you!’). Her body was a dark, bedraggled mass of ratty tails, like those handfuls of soiled sheep’s wool that you find caught on barbed-wire fences in wintertime, and her wings looked like a wrecked umbrella in a storm drain.
Muttering and complaining under her breath, she came hopping and clicking towards me across the floor, making completely pointless wing-flaps every few steps. She was so heavy that she could not even jump up to my wrist. She had to find a ladder of graduated footholds so that she could climb – from floor to footstool, from there to my knee, and then laboriously up my chest to my shoulder, still grumbling continuously. Once there, she tried to shake half a pint of water out of her wings, but her balance was so bad that she nearly fell off again, and she made me jump by locking her talons painfully in my shoulder.
I got carefully to my feet, and she clung on while I walked her slowly back into the kitchen. The ceiling strip-light was only a foot or so from the top of a stack of free-standing shelves. She climbed slowly and unsteadily up the inclined bridge of my arm until she could reach the top shelf. Again she tried to shake, but the flopping weight threatened to carry her over the edge. So there she stayed, as close to the warmth of the light as she could get, drying out by slow degrees for the rest of the evening.
This was obviously going to take hours, so I left her to it. From my chair in the living room I couldn’t see her, but a score of times I heard the rattle as she shook her sodden feathers in furious, ten-second bursts. If I craned backwards I could see her shadow on the kitchen wall, huge and nightmarish, as she turned herself inside out and upside down in a frenzy of flapping and grooming. When I went out after a couple of hours to see how she was getting on, she was leaning slightly forwards into the light with her thin racks of separated black flight feathers half open; she was an evil sight, and she seemed to know it. Her chances of achieving flight were about the same as one of those Edwardian cartoon ‘intrepid birdmen’ with strapped-on wings, about to fling himself off a clifftop with deranged confidence. (‘It’ll never work, Mumble – stay by the sunlamp.’)
That night I served the chicks in her open cage and left the kitchen light on, so that she could make up her own mind where she wanted to spend the hours until sunrise. She looked in pretty good shape by the next morning; the experience didn’t put her off occasional light bathing in the washing-up bowl, but she never again tried swimming under water.
* * *
Another habit that came as something of a surprise to me was her enjoyment of sunbathing. I was vaguely aware, of course, that on sunny days most birds occasionally like to get belly-down on the ground in a patch of dust and flap their feathers about. The dust helps clear out parasites, and the sunlight is a necessary source of vitamin D. But for some reason I had never connected this practice with night birds like Mumble, even though I had quickly learned that she was quite happy in the sunshine.
One summer weekend I was reading in the living room with the balcony door open when I heard a loud splat! from the cage – the sound of Mumble jumping down to the newspaper carpet. After a few moments I got up and took a peek around the corner on to the balcony, to satisfy a vague curiosity about what she was up to. For a microsecond my heart lurched: Mumble was lying flat on her belly on the floor. But almost immediately I sensed, from the relaxed nature of the slight movements that she was making, that she had taken up this pose deliberately. She was lying flat on her front in the largest patch of sunlight that she could find, with her wings spread wide, her neck bent back, and her face pointing directly upwards into the sunshine with closed eyes.
Before I turned quietly away and left her to enjoy it, I noticed that – oddly – the sunbathing session seemed to involve much the same sort of facial transformation as when she snapped on to the alert when spotting a pigeon taking liberties outside the window. Why this should be, when the one activity was presumably a sensual pleasure and the other a prelude to combat, seemed baffling, but there was no mistaking the resemblance. The skin of her head looked tight, and the close packing of the feathers gave her a ‘pinhead’ look. The furry wedge of feathers between her slitted eyes protruded and spread wider sideways, covering the inner top part of the eyes so that they appeared tilted and further apart. This ‘squared off’ or ‘Oriental’ expression was absolutely distinct from her usual appearance in repose.
* * *
For the first time, in November
1980 – so when she was about two and a half years old, and at completely the wrong time of year – I noticed broody behaviour that finally convinced me that Mumble must indeed be a hen bird. I found her sitting in the semi-darkness on the hallway table on a large, dish-shaped ashtray. During our first months together I had often found her lying flat on her front for a rest, but this was quite different. She had arranged herself exactly like a chicken sitting on its eggs – lying on her front, head back and tail cocked up, with her body feathers puffed out sideways and her wings folded protectively around the ‘nest’. She seemed dozy, and made sleepy cheeping noises when I stroked her. Very occasionally over the hours that followed she would stand up, shuffle sideways around the rim of the ashtray while pecking vaguely at it, and then fluff herself up and settle down on it once again with a shake of her skirts. She continued this, off and on, for about eight days. (Although I kept an eye out for this behaviour the following spring, and in the years thereafter, I very seldom saw her repeat it, and never for days at a time like this first occasion.)
* * *
Diary: 30 December 1980
Since getting back from the Christmas holiday at Dick’s, and remembering both Mumble’s broody behaviour last month and her previous response to other owls, I’ve been thinking about what she has missed through being born into captivity. There is obviously something about caging a bird that we instinctively see as wrong, because the very idea of flight represents freedom to us, so I had better keep myself honest by thinking this through every now and then.
The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar Page 12