By November she was back into her unvarying winter routine, which is best described as ‘stereotypically British’ – she was perfectly civil but fairly self-contained, and only occasionally affectionate. Each morning she would warble softly into the bottom corner of the night cage when I uncovered it. She would come hesitantly to the doorstep, where she seemed to enjoy a brief greeting, but then either went back inside to her corner perch, or hopped to my shoulder and then flew directly up to her high larder-top. Usually she stayed up there for as long as I gave her the chance, but most weekends she would occasionally fly down to my shoulder or the kitchen table after an hour or so, diffidently suggesting a cuddle.
When it was time to get into the basket for the trip to the aviary she was quite calm. She spent most of her winter days in a motionless ball of feathers in the dark corner of her private perch, camouflaged by her ceiling and two walls of ivy. In the evenings she came to my shoulder briefly, but then usually had to be coaxed or even grabbed to make her enter the basket. Her mood was generally low-key, but perfectly pleasant. There was no bat-walking, no hooting and head-shots, and no whistling war-dance. For the great majority of the winters we lived our lives peacefully in parallel.
* * *
It had been predictable that our relationship would become rather more distant in our new surroundings, not only literally but also psychologically. At its simplest, the reason was that Mumble and I were no longer spending almost every evening in each other’s close company.
After our first year or two of excited mutual discovery in the flat, our relationship had anyway settled into a contented routine; but while we were sharing the same space most evenings I had still been the main focus of her attention, as she was of mine. But in Sussex we no longer really shared a territory except for during weekend mornings; she had her own territory – and a new, crowded mental life – out of doors. It was quite natural that her much more varied surroundings and the stimuli that they constantly delivered would occupy her attention for much of the time. For me, the great compensation was the opportunities they gave me to watch her adjusting to these new circumstances and excitements.
9
Real Trees and Free-Range Mice
BOTH MUMBLE AND I had a certain amount of adjustment to cope with during that first autumn and early winter of 1981. For me the change meant finding my way around our village, town and the countryside between, locating the shops and services that I would need for my new routines (not least, a reliable supplier of chicks). For Mumble, it meant getting accustomed to the gardens, copses and hedges around us being full of the rush and fuss of birds harvesting berries, seedheads and nuts while they could, their numbers swollen by migrants from northern Europe. As the season drew on she also had to learn to tolerate the occasional handsome cock pheasant venturing into the garden and strutting about as if he owned it, issuing his rusty, clucking calls (there was a large private estate nearby, and the fenced wood on a hill above our village was full of birds being reared for the guns).
All this activity attracted attention from other eyes than Mumble’s. I never heard or saw a buzzard hanging above our spur of the South Downs, but one morning a hysterical chorus along the hedgerow across the nearest field heralded the big, blue-grey bullet of a sparrowhawk exploding into the open amid a scatter of flying leaves. When I went down the garden to fetch Mumble in one night I heard a fox taking a rabbit about a hundred yards away in the fields, and felt glad that I had not skimped on the construction of the aviary (although I doubt that any fox would be foolhardy or desperate enough to try its luck against a full-grown tawny on its own territory).
In the city the first frosts had meant nothing but slippery pavements; here, I began my morning journey to London among bushes fuzzy with silver rime glittering in the flat sunlight, and as I drove towards town between the smooth shoulders of the hills the air tasted like chilled champagne compared with what I had got used to dragging into my lungs for so many years past. The extra hour of commuting was tiring, but when I opened my curtains on a Saturday morning the rewards were immediate and enticing.
* * *
In the wild, winter has both advantages and disadvantages for an owl exercising its rights over a much wider territory than my few square yards of garden. In the biting cold a tawny needs to keep up its strength with very regular feeding. It helps that there is less food about for the rodents; they grow careless during their constant foraging, and the thin, pale grass gives less cover for the runs of the field voles. On the other hand, if snow falls and lies it hides their tunnels beneath the surface. Although an owl’s hearing is sufficiently acute for it to stalk rodents successfully even when they are surprisingly deep below a layer of snow, it is in weather like this that small birds living within an owl’s territory are wise to pick their concealed night roosting-places with particular care.
Diary: 20 December 1981
For the past two days and nights it’s been snowing quite heavily off and on. Although Mumble’s private-corner perch is well sheltered from above, the snow has been falling through the mesh roof thickly enough to make a drift several inches deep on the feeding shelf, and the water in her dish is frozen solid. She’ll have to get used to this every few winters, so I take her out as usual in the mornings. Snow and ice is a first for her, and she seems unimpressed. She tried standing on the ice in her dish, and pecked at it a couple of times before giving up in disgust. Then she paddled around in the snow on her shelf, and tried to eat a mouthful of it. This was definitely a mistake, and she shook her head furiously to get rid of it – uggh! She spends the days as normal, fluffed up inside her built-in duvet on her private perch, and doesn’t seem to feel the cold unusually (after all, she’s built for it). Her appetite is healthy, but not ravenous. I bring her in early in the evenings; last night I tried leaving the kitchen tap dripping in case she was thirsty, but she preferred to drink from a saucepan that I had left full of water to soak clean in the sink.
9 January 1982
Saturday afternoon – I was working in the office (the back bedroom overlooking the garden) when I heard a lot of unusual noise, including the belling of hounds and the thudding of hooves. When I leaned over to look out the window I could see flashes of bright scarlet beyond the nearest hedge. I got outside in time to see the local hunt crossing the fields at the bottom of the garden, and a stream of noisily excited foxhounds poured through a hedge-gap within a couple of yards of the aviary. They were not visibly chasing anything, but the soundtrack was splendidly stirring.
Mumble reacted by getting on to a perch as far away from the action as she could. I’ve read that birds are more disturbed by vibrations through the ground than by actual noise – could the thunder of the hooves have been transmitted up the embedded branches that support her perch? Then a riderless horse ambled up and put its head over the hedge, and Mumble went into pigeon-spotting mode – all tall, thin and suspicious. The horse was eventually followed by a stout, puffing gentleman dressed in mud-caked black and white, who took some time to gentle it before leading it away. By this time the hounds were running in happy, pointless circles all over the field. Mumble didn’t return to her usual perch until the whole noisy pageant had drifted away. When the hounds were just a quiet song on the breeze she eventually settled herself flouncily.
12 January
Cold, starlit night. When I went out to collect Mumble I couldn’t see her until I was inside the aviary – she was sitting absolutely rigid and focused at one end of her private-corner perch. Eventually I heard the very faintest of rustling noises in the grass at the foot of the hedge. Calls, whistles, stroking and even blowing up her breast feathers (usually guaranteed to provoke her) failed to get the slightest response. Since she was facing away from me, when I got cold and irritated enough I just picked her up from behind her legs and put her in the basket. When we got into the kitchen she flew to the top of her night cage and glared out the side window, staying quite still and visibly ‘on guard’. Eventually the
offer of a chick tempted her to forget the potential meal and enjoy an actual one.
16 January
We enjoyed the usual leisurely Saturday morning routine in the kitchen. While I made my breakfast she was having hers in the open night cage. When I heard her thump up on to the doorstep perch I went round, and she greeted me affectionately – perhaps a shade too affectionately, since she hadn’t yet had a ‘feek’ to clean the goop off her beak. Then she jumped on to my shoulder and came back to where I was sitting at the table with my second coffee. Just as when we were in the flat, this is our main time together, and we had an enjoyable mutual preening session.
After she had reassured me by using her tray-perch I took her upstairs with me when I went up again to shower. She took off and flew up the high stairwell in a tight spiral, meeting me on the landing. Although I left the bathroom door open for her she was much more interested in playing on the bookshelves on the landing and in my bedroom. The only price I paid for letting her upstairs was that she crapped over a Filofax that I had carelessly left lying around (a mishap that I saw as a powerful image of the conflicting demands of my urban and rural lives).
I cannot fathom her weird passion for crawling headfirst down tunnels, apparently the narrower the better. She crouched flat on her front to squeeze on to the top, half-depth shelf on the landing (5-inch clearance), and at one point she was actually crawling along behind the books on another shelf, warbling happily.
* * *
By the spring of 1982 Mumble seemed to have entirely settled into country living. Although her normal calm was disturbed whenever she saw something new for the first time, she soon became blasé about it and simply filed it away in her head. An exception was the sound (or vibration?) of farm machinery close by. She seemed to dislike ploughing and harrowing in the next field, and particularly the racket of a tractor with a hedge-trimmer attachment as it thrummed, crashed and screeched its way along the hedgerows.
A good deal of this learning process must have gone on while I was out at work, but occasionally I was on hand to notice her doing her cos-lettuce imitation. The first time a Friesian cow put its head over the hedge a few yards from the aviary she seemed to go into a rigor of stunned disbelief, squeezed tight and thin and stretched to about half again her normal height, with a furry ‘hatchet face’ and Chinese eyes. One May night when I went out to fetch her I heard a fearsome wheezing and grunting in the garden, and found Mumble rapt and motionless on her front perch. I recognized the noise from a memorable night during my suburban childhood, but she didn’t; she was utterly transfixed by the spectacle of two hedgehogs copulating laboriously under the raspberry bushes.
I expected that in the mating season she might get rather more gentleman visitors than she had done in South London; after all, there were more of them around down here, and she was easier to find. As it turned out, the frequency of such advances seemed much the same – and so did her responses. During February and March her mood was generally belligerent; she was permanently on the look-out for intruders, wearing her ‘war face’. Her sense of her own territory must have been much greater in the Sussex countryside than it ever had been on an urban balcony. She had much wider views, but she had to compensate by calls and displays of body language for her inability to fly out and physically defend this wider ‘mental territory’.
I heard plenty of calling and counter-calling on winter nights, but I never saw a male tawny at such close quarters as I had done when in the flat (though I might well have simply missed such encounters – obviously, I was much further away from the action when Mumble was in the aviary at the bottom of the garden). However, I did make a note of one rather more surprising episode.
When I went out to fetch Mumble one night she was entirely calm and friendly, until she suddenly jerked alert and stared vertically up through her ceiling. She leapt out on to the most exposed of her perches and kept up this intent surveillance, twisting, raising and lowering her head as her computer locked on to whatever she could see and hear up there, and tracked its every move. Clearly, something that I couldn’t make out was circling above us in the dark. I waited for her to bellow a challenging hoot or a vulgar ‘kee-wikk!’, but to my surprise she remained silent. Then, from the darkness above there came an eerie shriek – the intruder was a Barn Owl, not a tawny. Still Mumble stayed silent, but her head tracked it smoothly as it flew away. It took me a long time to settle her down before she would get in the basket and come indoors.
* * *
Diary: 3 July 1982
I simply never can tell what will excite Mumble and what will leave her unmoved. On Sunday afternoon I was reading in the garden when I saw Buster [a neighbour’s cat] picking his way down the back lawn towards the hedge-gap leading into the field. Mumble came out of her private corner on to the front perch, and fixed her attention on him. Cat and owl watched one another respectfully and at length, like a pair of wary gunfighters in a Sergio Leone film, but Mumble showed no actual excitement. Her mood was one of calm, still, focused watchfulness: ‘You and I both know that we don’t want to tangle – so just keep on going, Buster, and we’ll each tend to our own business …’
On the other hand, one afternoon recently when I walked past the aviary carrying a bunch of sweet peas that I had picked, she stirred from her doze into a display of apparent outrage. This happened again, several times – and always with sweet peas. Go figure …
* * *
Occasionally, but not often, Mumble would be mobbed by small birds who spotted her in daytime, despite the ivy camouflaging her in her dark private corner. From my desk upstairs I would hear this begin, usually with the repeated alarm call of a blackbird, and by the time I had got to the window to look down a number of smaller birds – sparrows, finches and tits – would be gathering as near to the aviary as they dared. They moved around nervously from perch to perch, flapping their wings and cocking their tails, while delivering a cacophony of alarm calls to advertise Mumble’s presence to any other potential prey. This raucous scolding might go on for several minutes at a time, but she seemed able to ignore it completely – she might blink, but she didn’t even shuffle on her perch, and certainly didn’t emerge from her cover in a threatening way. Apparently this is normal even in the wild, where there is no wire mesh between the owl and its tormentors. The racket has only a nuisance value, but I was impressed by Mumble’s patience – I got more irritated by the monotonous hysteria than she did.
* * *
I was vaguely disappointed that the first actual kill I saw her make (beetles don’t count) was an earthworm. I had read that tawnies often hunt worms on the ground when damp weather brings them to the surface, but although I congratulated her when I disturbed her eating it one dreary day in March 1982, I couldn’t help feeling that this was nothing to write home about. I supposed that it was as much as I could realistically expect; a worm on the surface would be easy to catch, and was not entirely unlike the shoelaces she had loved playing with as a fledgling. More significantly, Mumble had never been given the slightest education in the subject of brown furry things that ran about on four legs; if one scuttled across the aviary how would she even recognize it as supper, let alone seize the brief opportunity to catch it? (Incidentally, worm-loving readers may be consoled to learn that throughout the speedy process of ingestion the luckless creature maintained an air of stupefied boredom, displaying no more animation than the length of spaghetti that its final exit so closely called to mind.)
However, within the month Mumble proved that she had indeed taught herself how to kill for food without the aid of instruction, and that a fairly steady stream of the local rodent population were carelessly taking shortcuts through the aviary. In good weather I quite often left Mumble out at night if she seemed reluctant to come indoors, so these fatal encounters may have taken place more regularly after dark, leaving no evidence at the scene by the time I came out to her the next morning. Whether or not that was true (and it seems most likely), the kills that
I was aware of seemed mostly to take place during the day, and usually during the spring and early summer. This pattern repeated itself every year from 1982 onwards, and the following notes are a compiled selection from her game book:
Mid-March 1982
First-time kill? I went out to the aviary late at night, and as soon as I opened the back door of the house I heard her giving muffled, brassy whoops, as if she was playing a trumpet muted with a rolled-up pair of socks. She had her mouth full, of course – with about 75 per cent of a self-caught mouse. She was very proud and fierce, but seemed a bit undecided about what to do next – after all, if this is her first time, she has never ‘been on the course’. She brought it with her into the basket, and carried it around the kitchen for a bit. When I opened the night cage she took it inside with her, and later polished it off quite happily – in addition to her suppertime chick.
Mid-April
I came home in the evening to find that she had caught another mouse or vole. She was dragging its headless corpse around in her beak, and when she saw me she started making a great triumphalist fuss.
7 May
She caught another field mouse; she must have killed it this morning, because I put her out at breakfast time and noticed it when I visited her at about noon. It was perfectly unmarked apart from a broken neck and a neat, surgical incision up one side of its chest. She cawed boastfully while flying round the aviary at top speed, making loud, flashy landings and waving the corpse about. At last she stashed it inside her hutch. She spent more of the day than usual up and about, sitting slitty-eyed on perches watching the nearest greenery. In my mind’s eye I could see the thought-bubble: ‘Here I sit, the keen-eyed hunter – don’t come on to my patch unless you’re tired of living!’ In the evening she fished her mouse out again, did a repeat performance of the laps of honour, and finally took it to her shelf to eat.
The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar Page 20