The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar

by Windrow, Martin

  Her floor was no longer of concrete carpeted with newspaper, but the living earth covered with grass, wildflowers and weeds growing in dappled sunlight and shadows. She was no longer living in an urban cave: above her mesh ceiling, instead of a dark, enclosing slab of concrete she had the open sky. What’s more, it was a country sky – lively with drifting clouds and flying birds by day, and by night black and jewelled, instead of being stained a dirty orange-brown by city lights.

  Above all, on every surface of this whole new deep-focus environment, she was surrounded by constantly shifting patterns of miniature movements, while her ears picked up a vast range of sounds from near and far – the sounds of other living creatures, everything from insects to cows.

  For Mumble to assimilate all this from hour to hour, to process it and learn appropriate responses to it, must have been both engrossing and, at first, perhaps even scary (though I doubt it – Tawny Owls don’t do fear). Throughout that September she was certainly hyperactive and distracted. She was difficult in the mornings when I let her out of the kitchen cage, and again when I took the basket out to the aviary to bring her in at night. She was also ravenous, but that may have been due simply to the season rather than any reaction to the move. I had noticed the previous September that for about three weeks she seemed much hungrier than usual, demanding chicks night and morning. Now she went into a chittering frenzy at the sight of food, and one morning she even dived straight out the opened door of the kitchen cage to snatch a chick right out of my hand as I approached. The weather was warm, but the only logical explanation I could think of was that despite the earliness of the season she was instinctively building up her fat reserves before the year turned cold.

  * * *

  Inside the house, I had set up her old night cage in a convenient corner of the kitchen, beside a window but round a corner from the main part of the room. She would be within close sight of the coffee-brewing facilities, so she would see a familiar activity when I uncovered the cage in the mornings.

  I had taken the decision that with a spacious new aviary Mumble would spend more time out of doors than when we had lived in the flat, and that when indoors she would no longer have the run of the place, but would be confined to the big kitchen. I would miss our shared evenings, but there were simply too many crannies in the fairly open-plan house for her to hide (and crap) in, and – more to the point – too many windows that I would have had to remember to keep closed. Above all, I must admit that I didn’t want my new home to be squalid with soiled newspapers and sheets of plastic.

  The kitchen was large and, thanks to an extension, oddly U-shaped, with plenty of shelves and cupboards for her to perch on and explore, and its surfaces would be fairly easy to keep clean. I installed her tray-perch on a work surface at the bend of the U, from where she could see both halves of the room and both windows. Since keeping the door into the rest of the house closed would rob her of her usual vantage-point, I set up a perch for her at the highest point in the room, on top of a tall larder cupboard. This was high under the ceiling in the angle of two walls, much like her old door-top perch, with a good view to the largest window and the garden beyond. There were broad sills along both windows (complete with sacrificial potted plants), a double sink under the one facing the garden, and a large pine table that we could share. Nobody likes change, of course, but I was satisfied that all Mumble’s main requirements for daily comfort were covered.

  Since my commute to and from London was longer now, the chances were that sometimes I would not make the last train home, so I considered the possibility of designing some sort of owl-feeder that would deliver pre-thawed rations for a couple of days at a time. The sketches in my notebooks owe more to Heath Robinson than to Leonardo, and, since I am no engineer, they seem to rely exclusively on melting ice as a timing system. (Measure time taken for ice-block of known dimensions to melt; place ice in plastic funnel of suitable calibre; place dead chick either directly on top of ice, or perhaps in small tray on pivoting arm counter-weighted at other end by ice-block?; when ice melts, chick will drop – either directly on to the feeding shelf, or, in one distinctly over-engineered version, on to an inclined plane that was apparently supposed to roll it somewhere else.)

  Probably wisely, I went for a much simpler solution. I introduced Mumble to my new next-door neighbours on either side, and showed them where to find my spare key, ready-thawed chicks, and a small, framed feeding-hole in the mesh of the aviary above her dining shelf. After what must have been an initial shock, both Richard and Steve kindly agreed that one or other of them would step in whenever emergency threatened. They were as good as their word, and they never let us down – not even on dirty nights when it must have been quite obvious from my telephone call that I was in some London bar. I don’t know what they thought of me, but in time they got quite fond of Mumble.

  The diary records that it was 12 October 1981, six weeks after the move, before Mumble seemed to have got a handle on the new situation and showed signs of reverting to her old habits. For the first time since we had moved in, when I opened the night cage that morning she did not play the drama queen, but hopped on to the doorstep perch, gave an alto croon and put her face up for a good-morning nuzzle. Her appetite had stabilized, and she made no demand for breakfast. After spending some time on my shoulder while I made coffee, she flew up to her larder-top perch and settled down to rip the newspaper under it into tiny shreds, dropping them over the edge one by one and watching intently as they fluttered to the floor. We seemed to be back to normal.

  * * *

  It was only when we were living in Sussex that I was able to make routine observations of the annual rhythm of Mumble’s life. This was possible because I had achieved for her a vague approximation of a Tawny Owl’s natural physical and mental environment – still very approximate, of course, but at least a good deal closer than had been possible in a flat high above city streets.

  Over the course of the years that followed I noted both a definite sequence of seasonal mood swings that coloured her behaviour, and the progress of the biggest physical event in her annual calendar – the moulting season each summer. As I have already mentioned, it was only after our move to the country that her moults seem to have conformed to an unmistakable and predictable pattern. The notebooks in which I recorded the daily changes, and compared one year with the next, inevitably make tediously repetitive reading, so the rest of this chapter is a compilation of the entries that I made over several years. It starts with the beginning of Mumble’s year, a few weeks before a wild tawny would begin the process of reforging its bond with its mate and selecting a nest for that year’s brood.

  Diary: 1 January

  For the past three months she has behaved much as she was doing in late September. The whole winter has been very mild, and she showed little sign of wanting to come in at night. I often left her out, and sometimes had to grab her when I did insist that she get into the basket.

  She has started doing her midwinter ‘bat-walking’ act across the mesh ceiling of the aviary. This involves flying up, doing a back-flip, grabbing the mesh with both feet, then walking ‘foot over foot’ right across the ceiling while hanging almost upside-down with her wings slowly fanning. I cannot begin to imagine what it’s all about, but there is definitely a rather aggressive swagger to the performance.

  Today the weather is mild, dull and rainy. I didn’t get up until 9am (it’s the New Year bank holiday, and most of the adult population of the British Isles are nursing a giant collective hangover), and when I came down Mumble was warbling softly into a corner of her kitchen cage. She kept this up until I uncovered the cage, then she turned and hopped to a perch, with a couple of soft squeaks. She waited quietly until I opened up, then jumped at once to her doorstep. She put her face up for a nuzzle and kept soaking this treatment up for as long as I handed it out, rubbing and twisting her head against my face and gently pecking at my beard. She jumped to my shoulder when I patted it, and from the
re quietly to her tray-perch. After using it, she sat calmly watching while I made my breakfast until she got bored, and then flew up to the larder-top perch for a bit of light self-grooming.

  I made a few ‘Happy New Year’ phone calls, during which she squeaked obligingly when I held the handset up to her. This seemed to wake her up, and she jumped from my shoulder on to the kitchen table for some mutual preening. At one point we both watched a dog in the garden, with mild interest. She hovered close when, on an impulse, I opened the kitchen door and let her come through with me and upstairs, for a treat. This caused great excitement, but after spiralling up the stairwell she spent most of her time up there in the bedroom wardrobe, pursuing her obsessive interest in dark burrows.

  When I eventually took her downstairs she hopped obediently into the basket. Once inside the aviary she went into her hutch briefly, then came out on to her doorstep for ten minutes or so while she checked out her domain. When I looked out the window at about 11.30am she was inside the hutch, and she seemed to stay there silently for the rest of the day. I heard a few tentative hoots at about 9pm. I brought her in at 11.30pm, without any objection; and so to bed.

  2 January

  This morning there was no cuddling. She jumped straight to my shoulder, then to the tray-perch, then up to the larder-top; and there she stayed, resisting all invitations and blandishments. As it was a vile day, with blowing rain, I left her there when I went out shopping. When I got back at about lunchtime there was evidence that while I was gone she had come down to the tray-perch, used it and returned to the cupboard (if only this was a predictable daily routine …). Again, there was no difficulty persuading her into the basket, and once in the aviary she went straight to her private-corner perch and stayed there.

  For the first time this winter there are sheep in the nearest field; she seems completely uninterested in them.

  5 January

  When I put her in the kitchen cage last thing, it became clear that she had secretly stowed a bit of her last night’s chick under the newspaper in one corner for later – this is the first time she’s done that this year. I still gave her a whole chick tonight, and she finished both.

  Second and third weeks of January

  She’s still hiding a breakfast snack from her supper about every second or third night. This has roughly coincided with a change to much colder and windier weather, but there seems to be no exact correlation.

  More noticeably, she has begun doing her ‘hoot and head-shot’ routine, as in previous winters. Is this change of behaviour connected with the mating season? When she first hears me morning and evening, there’s a great deal of ‘Indian whooping into corners’ inside the night cage and aviary hutch before she emerges into sight. Then, when I let her out in the morning, when I go into the aviary at night – and on a few occasions when I have come back into the kitchen unexpectedly while she was free – she hoots quite an aggressive challenge and flies at my head. She doesn’t strike at it with her feet, just lands on top. When I put up a wrist she steps on to it and lets herself be carried down quite calmly, and there’s no repeat of this behaviour while she’s free. (So far, there’s no sign of the next recorded stage of the midwinter behaviour – the ‘whistling war-dance’.) She’s still generally quite sociable; she came to the shoulder unbidden during a Sunday morning newspaper session, then jumped to my crooked-up knee and craned up her face for a nuzzle in the old way, talking in soft squeaks and croons.

  Fourth week of January

  She’s now doing the full-blown HHS plus WWD when we meet morning and night. First the warbling into corners, then the hoot and head-shot, then the whistling war-dance – as I lift her down from my head she climbs up my arm to the crook of the elbow and kicks at it a couple of times, while giving whistling squeals and flapping her wings in an excited little spasm. And whenever I go into the aviary at night she does a lot of vigorous bat-walking across the ceiling, ending with the most amazing back-flips down again, to land sitting neatly upright on pinpoint targets like the hutch doorstep or the inside of the basket. Given the angles and distances, these three-dimensional aerobatics should be completely impossible; she makes Russian teenage gymnasts look clumsy.

  * * *

  Mumble’s bat-walking on her ceiling was standard behaviour each midwinter, but the onset of the hooting and head-shot plus whistling war-dance differed slightly each year, the first element always preceding the second by a week or more. I noted them in mid- and late January respectively in most years; but in 1988 she remained positively dozy and cuddly until the last week of January, then began the HHS tentatively and inconsistently, and the WWD didn’t kick in until the first week of February. (Once she started these behaviours in any year, however, she kept up the full routine until about late May.)

  At about this same time each year I also noted that she was caching part of her supper overnight, and bringing it out of the night cage with her in the morning. She then usually carried it around the kitchen in her beak from perch to perch, bugling insistently, until she finally settled to eat it on top of the larder. I always offered her a feed night and morning during cold winter weather, and she never turned down the chance of a chick. But while I didn’t make the connection at the time, I guessed later that the snack-saving might be because the twice-a-day feeds weren’t allowing her enough time between meals to digest a whole chick. I found it impressive that she realized this in advance, and had the self-discipline and foresight to stop eating halfway through and tuck the rest away for later.

  In 1989 I recorded that the timetable was slightly delayed compared with the previous year. On 28 January I noted that she was doing the HHS at night but not in the morning, and there was no sign of WWD. She still liked her nuzzle on the doorstep first thing, but would only come to my shoulder or lap and demand further preening after she had been free in the kitchen for at least an hour during long weekend mornings. (The notebook recalls that one morning she was sitting on my shoulder while I was reading the paper when she suddenly did a titanic sneeze, spattering the newspaper two feet in front of her ‘nose’. She shook her head vigorously a couple of times, but then – like me – she calmly turned her attention back to the Sunday Telegraph’s thoughtful analysis of the Five Nations rugby tournament.)

  That January she showed no desire for breakfasts, and late in the month she had not yet started caching snacks overnight. I wondered whether the mild winter might be affecting her behaviour; we had had very few frosts that year, the crocuses were up, and even a few foolhardy daffodils. However, in mid-February 1989 I noted that she was again stowing away snacks every second or third night, and by the third week of the month it was every night – though this seemed to have nothing to do with how well I was feeding her. When she brought the snacks out of her night cage with her, she seemed to be trying to tell me something. She kept following me around with them, even bringing them to my shoulder, while giving the full hoot – ‘Hooo! … hoo, hoo-hoo HOOO!’ (though with her mouth full this sounded more like quacking). She seemed to expect me to do something with them. Was it possible that she was trying to feed me again?

  In 1991 I noted that she didn’t start the hooting and head-shots until the second week of February, and there was no whistling war-dance on my arm until the middle of that month. Again, I’ve no idea if the weather was a factor that year; we had an unusually severe winter, with heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures for a week in early February. Generally, this didn’t seem to inconvenience Mumble at all; she was not really bothered if she came in for the night or not, and as soon as the water in her dish melted she had a thorough bath. I found her sitting in an icy wind, soaking wet right through but apparently quite comfortable.

  * * *

  Third week of February

  The pattern seems firmly established: bat-walking and back-flips, saving snacks every night, and HHS plus WWD. Her emotions are at a high pitch, and her feelings seem confused. One night when I brought her in she jumped out of the basket and flew
straight into the night cage, but when I approached with a chick she flew straight out again and hovered round me at waist height, wings flapping, until I threw it in.

  5 March

  Much the same morning drama. She emerged carrying a full half of last night’s supper, and flew around from perch to perch, keeping close to me and all the time yelling monotonously round her beakful of chick. This went on for nearly ten minutes before she finally took it up to the larder top and ate it. I wish I could figure out what she expects me to do about this – I feel stupid in the face of her urgent but incomprehensible nagging. Does she want me to take it from her? Is this some sort of displaced maternal behaviour? At this time of year it’s impossible to interpret what role she has cast me in, and it seems to change from one moment to the next.

  When she finally finished her snack she seemed to calm down. She stropped her beak clean a few times on the ‘cliff edge’, then settled down – but not on her perch. She came right forwards to the edge of the larder cupboard and lay down flat on her front, with her breast and shawl feathers puffed up and her face resting on top of her claws. But not more than thirty seconds passed before she looked at me, did a theatrical double-take, and her eyes grew huge. She started hooting aggressively, shuffling from one foot to the other, and then flew at my head. When I put up an arm and diverted her down, she didn’t do her whistling war-dance in the crook of my elbow, but clung to it tensely, mantling her wings and giving occasional hoots. She let me cuddle her for a moment, then flew off high again – and soon afterwards back into the cage, where she started her monotonous whooping into a corner. This has got to be something to do with the nesting season.