I used to try in vain to work out at roughly what times of day, in relation to her feeds, Mumble was likely to slice, but it was hopeless. I was slightly more successful in figuring out the probable danger areas around the flat, laying copious newspapers on the floor and spreading thin plastic sheets around. The most obvious ‘ground zero’ was a radius around her favourite perches, but she sometimes fooled me with her insouciant timing, and I simply had to accept that stains, scrubbing and subsequent patches of bleaching on the living-room carpet were inevitable. (Luckily, it was cheap and I had never liked the colour anyway.) My willingness to pay this price for living with an owl was probably the eccentricity that my urban friends found hardest to understand.
By contrast with this unavoidably unpleasant business, the pelleting (so useful to scientists researching owl diets and distribution) was a sedate affair. In the gizzard the indigestible parts of the prey were neatly formed into a short, sausage-shaped parcel wrapped in the tightly packed debris of fur or feather, which passed back up to the pre-stomach. There it remained for several hours before being re gurgitated. In the wild this usually happens while the owl is roosting during the day, and the textbooks say that during the digestive process no new prey can be swallowed – a fact that I was slow to pick up on, so (as mentioned) Mumble often got her rations divided between supper and breakfast. Nevertheless, she seemed able to shuffle it all around internally without discomfort.
The signal that Mumble was contemplating bringing up a pellet began with her yawning widely; then she would bow low, and shake her head vigorously from side to side at a rate of four or five shakes per second. She would then pause, sit upright for a couple of seconds, and then bow and give another rapid series of head-shakes. She repeated this whole sequence perhaps four or five times, and then gave a series of huge yawns – every ten seconds or so, over up to a minute at a time. After a further series of head-shakes in an upright stance, she might forget the whole thing, as if deciding that she had gone off the boil for now – like a human misled by an apparently imminent sneeze that stubbornly refuses to happen. But if she was ready, then she would bow again, close her eyes, shake her head – and the pellet would drop neatly out of her beak. There was no gagging or spitting reflex; the pellet would not appear during a yawn, but during one of her sideways head-shakes. Given her almost exclusive diet of chicks, the smooth pellets were yellowish-grey; the initial slick of moisture dried off fast, and there was nothing at all distasteful about handling them.
This process did not seem to require much concentration, or to make Mumble feel vulnerable or self-conscious. If I happened to walk past while she was yawning or shaking her head, she might occasionally hop down to my shoulder and carry on there, as if nothing remarkable was occurring.
* * *
Mumble clearly got as much sensual pleasure from stretching as any other animal does.
Standing on a perch that gave her a good deal of clear space behind her feet, she would balance on one leg and lean slightly towards that side. Then she would slowly and deliberately stretch the other wing out and downwards, her primary and secondary feathers spreading like fingers, while simultaneously stretching that leg and foot downwards inside the wing, with the toes splayed apart. After holding this pose for a couple of seconds, she would gently furl up the wing, return that foot to the perch, lean to the other side, and repeat the performance with her other wing and leg. When she was centred once more, she would crouch forwards with her head over her toes, and crook both wings stiffly up above her back in symmetrical L-shapes bent at the ‘wrist’, as if she was imitating the eagle standard of a Roman legion. Finally, she would stand upright again, shrug her refolded wings into place comfortably, and give her body feathers a settling shake. She was once doing a wing-stretch as I walked through the door below her; simultaneously, she squeaked at me, continued the stretch, and was gripped by a sudden urge to yawn cavernously. This made her look rather like a cartoon opera singer making a hugely theatrical gesture as she reached her top note (though Mumble’s came out like the squawk of a tin trumpet).
* * *
Stretching seemed to be a casual and unthinking self-indulgence; by contrast, a full-scale grooming session was a wholly absorbing business that could easily occupy Mumble for up to an hour of methodical maintenance work.
All birds groom themselves at frequent intervals, both to clean their dense plumage of dust and parasites and to keep their flying surfaces zipped together. The individual barbs of their flight feathers are hooked together into a continuous vane by means of tiny barbules along the edge. These come apart with vigorous use, and the bird ‘re-zips’ them by running the feather through its beak. Mumble usually started the grooming session with her wings, lifting them and twisting them inwards and forwards as she selected frayed or disordered flight feathers one by one and dragged them through her beak slowly from side to side, making her machine-gunning noise at about eight beats a second as she zipped their edges tight again. Sometimes I caught her doing this backwards with her head twisted round and halfway down her back while she pecked at one of her primaries.
As a spectator, I found Mumble’s body-grooming a never-failing source of entertainment – she was so impossibly agile, and just so damn busy. During these sessions her head was never still for more than a few seconds. With eyes closed or slitted, it nodded up and down, twisted round and tilted from side to side as she fossicked and nibbled with her beak among the roots of her feathers. Her suit of skin gave the odd impression of being oversize, loose, and attached at only a few essential points, and her body-grooming demonstrated yet again that her plumage was grouped into independently movable ‘panels’. She could shrug the rear shawl feathers to left or right, bringing almost the whole group around one shoulder in either direction to within reach of her beak. To tackle her throat feathers involved making her head appear much smaller and flatter-backed than usual. The toque of head and neck feathers slipped down into a bulky ruff, which she nibbled by pushing her compressed head back and tipping her face forwards, catching the ruff under her ‘chin’ and then working her beak slowly round to one shoulder, rootling hard and peck-peck-pecking.
Tawnies are physically capable of rotating their heads a full 270 degrees. That is, in human terms, as if you started with your face forwards (12 o’clock), then rotated it 180 degrees to the right until you were looking straight backwards (6 o’clock) – then continued to turn it to the right until you were looking in line with your left shoulder (9 o’clock). Even if your neck had as many vertebrae as an owl’s you couldn’t do this without losing consciousness, because the compression of the major blood vessels as your neck twisted would starve your brain of oxygen; owls have a special ‘bypass’ adaptation to their carotid and vertebral arteries that prevents this happening. (In practice, of course, Mumble usually had enough sense not to twist her head through more than 180 degrees – if she wanted to nibble at one side of herself, why go the long way round?)
When she hunched her head down into her toque-feathers with no visible neck, and bowed face first in any direction to reach her lower parts with her beak, the stretching extension of her long neck was completely hidden inside what looked like a single, continuous ball of feathers incorporating head and body together. When she closed her eyes and rotated her head so that she could push her beak down into some part of the fluffed-up mass, her face seemed to disappear while it sneaked downwards in some unpredictable direction. When she half opened her eyes again in mid-groom her face suddenly reappeared, apparently growing out of an impossible part of her anatomy at an unexpected angle. The difficulty of telling, at any particular moment, which bit of the mass of feathers was Mumble’s head, and which wasn’t, was aggravated when she pushed her upside-down face backwards far under a wing, nibbling at the ‘wing-pit’ from underneath. When she turned her head 180 degrees backwards and ducked it down to peck at the base of her tail, then from the front she appeared to be completely headless. When she groomed her tail feat
hers she could manipulate their angle sharply in any direction, lifting and spreading them like fingers so as to get beak access to individual quills.
After I had watched this irresistible contortionist cabaret a few times, I began wondering why she seemed to spend so much time with her face rubbing and rolling just above her tail. Watching her from behind, I then got a momentary shock. The thick, dark feathers above her tail parted, and I saw a kind of pink pyramid protruding from the greyish skin in a little clearing between the feather shafts. For a second I wondered in alarm if this was some kind of injury, but then I saw Mumble’s ‘disembodied’ face sliding down through the thicket of feathers towards it. She began stropping the side of her beak against it with every sign of satisfaction, before straightening up and shrugging the feathers closed to hide it again. Ridiculously, I felt momentarily embarrassed at having intruded on what seemed like a particularly intimate phase of her toilette. A return to the textbooks taught me that this pink spike was her uropygial or preen gland; by rubbing it she stimulated the release of an oily liquid which she then rubbed over her feathers – both to condition them, and to stimulate the production of vitamin D when she sat in the sunshine. (Incidentally, I was surprised to learn that while Barn Owls have this gland, it produces no oil.)
The only part of Mumble’s body that she could not reach with her beak was her head itself, and as part of her grooming routine she would give the whole feathery ball a thorough raking with the claws of her free foot, like a dog scratching behind its ear with one hind leg on auto-rotate. She would set up a vigorous back-and-forth scratting with the razor-sharp points while delicately turning the facets of her head and face one way and another against this blurred ‘buzz-saw’, as tiny bits of feather-trash flew in all directions. When she stopped, all her face feathers would be standing out in a furry mass for several seconds before they gently sank back into place. (Again, on one occasion the urge to give her face a good scratching coincided with the pelleting process. She was sitting on a perch, yawning hugely; then she tilted her head sideways for a vigorous scratch, yawned again in the middle of it – and fell off into mid-air in an undignified bundle, her balance on one leg obviously unequal to the satisfaction of both urges at once.)
She ended any grooming session with a huge fluff-out and a hard, clearly audible shake, five or six times back and forth, with all the body feathers rising and separating. This was followed with a last prim, Victorian little shrug to settle the edges of her furled wings under the shawl and the fluffy edges of her breast feathers, and a final shuffle of her feet.
* * *
Mumble’s most constant occupation, from which all other pastimes were temporary distractions, was simply observing. Her job, her hobby, her passion was watching things – which is hardly surprising, given her place in the natural order. From her various preferred vantage points around the flat she kept constant surveillance over her environment, and when she detected any hint of sound or movement her evaluation of it was presumably based on the central question of any carnivore’s existence: can I jump on it, or is it going to jump on me?
If it was small and mobile (which, in a seventh-floor flat, meant it was an insect), then it could only travel a matter of inches before Mumble arrived like a Stuka; but if it sat still, being enigmatic, then she might settle down to outstare it. This balancing of boldness and caution in the face of the unrecognized cannot have been learned in her own short, protected lifetime, so it was clearly part of her genetic inheritance. Down tens of millions of years, was Protostrix still whispering a race-memory about dead twigs that turned out to have teeth? If so, Mumble was soon reassured that in this flat she was the pinnacle of the food chain. Her problem was that she was so much larger than any potential live prey that simply picking them up was tricky.
During her second summer, she noticed flies sitting on the ceiling of the living room. This provoked a series of determined but unsuccessful attacks. She sat on all possible perches glaring up at them, bobbing and weaving to follow their flights until it looked as if she would screw her head right off. When at last they seemed to have settled, she crouched, leapt into the air, and climbed in a frantic flurry of wingbeats. At the last moment she did an impressive aerial back-flip, belly parallel to the ceiling, and struck upwards at the flies with her feet. Naturally, she missed: they slipped out between her toes, leaving her to stall away in inverted flight, flapping madly to regain control before she hit the carpet. She would then repeat the whole pointless effort several times, until she got fed up and flew off in a sulk.
On one occasion (or one that I saw) she spotted something big and slow enough to give her a reasonable chance. Her sudden fixed stare drew my attention across the room to where a small beetle was climbing up the curtains. Feeling that she needed some encouragement after the fly debacle, I picked her up on my fist and carried her over, holding her close to the beetle. Peck! – near miss, disturbing the curtain; the beetle fell a few inches, but hung on and resumed its climb. Peck, peck! – another near miss, and this time the beetle spread its wings and flew off. Together, in a parody of hawking, we stalked it until it landed on the ceiling. Mumble watched it with laser intensity, settled herself, then kicked off mightily from my fist. A perfectly timed back-flip and upwards strike – an elegant Immelmann turn – and she was flying off with the beetle buzzing in her clenched foot, to crunch it at her ease on the door top.
* * *
In the relative absence of live prey, Mumble made do with war-games. She had learned early on the joys of jumping down from a height into a wastepaper basket and doing a war-dance among the satisfactorily scrunchy contents, but her main pleasures were pursued at higher altitudes.
One of the ceiling-light fixtures in the flat was fitted with a ‘Chinese lantern’ shade – a big white paper globe formed around spiralling circles of thin wire. Mumble soon discovered that attacking this was fun; the paper tore under her claw-kicks in a pleasurable way, while the globe bobbed about excitingly making bonk, bonk noises. The climax of this ‘First World War balloon-busting’ game occurred when she had punched so many holes into its shoulders that its increasing fragility and the slight weight of the wire armature reached a critical tipping point. One evening a final attack was enough to tear apart the shreds of paper remaining between two of the worst stretches of battle damage. This started a chain reaction, and as Mumble fluttered excitedly around it the whole spiral assembly slowly unravelled downwards towards the floor, like an apple peeling itself.
She was crazy about table lamps, and during our first year she cost me several broken ones by landing hard and clumsily on the upper edge of the shade, knocking them to the floor. To my surprise, the bright light shining in her eyes did not seem to bother her at all. If a lamp survived one of her brutal landings still upright, she would cling precariously to the thin rim of the shade, wings half open for balance, chin on her toes, and gaze right down into the brightness of the bulb. The attraction sometimes seemed to be the warmth; she would close her eyes and wobble on this insecure perch for minutes at a time, apparently basking. During one of these sunlamp sessions she got a bit too dopey and actually jumped deliberately down into the shade, with her feet on top of the bulb. Discovering too late that it was burning hot, she found herself confined within the narrow funnel of the shade with her wings extended above her head. She gave a convulsive heave of the legs and exploded upwards, while I grabbed vainly for the falling lamp. Before long I learned to buy much heavier-based replacements.
* * *
Mumble was even more certain death to houseplants. Sometimes she dropped heavily among the greenery from above, kicking and pecking, but the best game was stripping them ‘on the wing’. With their mass of long, hanging fronds, spider plants were her favourite prey. She would make a carefully calculated swoop across the room, snatch one of the leaves off as she passed in a fast, climbing turn, and carry it off to her door top. There she would seem to try to eat it, although this was completely against nature; s
he would hold the frond in one clenched foot like a stalk of asparagus, biting bits off it and tossing her head back as if she was trying to gulp them down. However, she always ended up dropping the shreds over the edge, and watching with rapt attention as they fell to the floor. I could follow the steady destruction of my houseplants by the faint pattering of debris falling on the newspapers spread below her perches.
On one occasion she engaged in a ludicrously show-offy variation of this game. Instead of bearing her catch off to a familiar perch, she flew to the alcove where I had hung a print of Albrecht Dürer’s charming 1508 study of a young tawny. There she posed, clinging to the deep frame as it tilted under her weight, with the frond clamped across her beak. When I went across to lift her off she bugled triumphantly (speaking with her mouth full always gave her voice a strangely metallic ring).
When Mumble first moved in, the biggest spider plant was growing in a pot on a wooden pedestal that stood in a corner at one end of the living-room window-wall. After she had knocked the pot over twice during her skip-bombing games of 633 Squadron I got fed up with sweeping compost off the carpet. I moved the plant pot to the end of the west windowsill, guarding it from further plucking by the strategic placement of the curtain and of a big, vicious Moroccan crown-of-thorns plant to which she had enough sense to give a wide berth. Rather than leaving the pedestal pointlessly empty, I replaced the plant pot with a sturdy near-lifesize bust of Germanicus Caesar (elder brother of Claudius, and – to judge from the writings of Tacitus – the best man in a spectacularly dysfunctional family).
The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar Page 16