The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar

by Windrow, Martin

  Mid-June

  One night when I went out to her I found her obviously excited, but could not work out why. She was hopping around, squeaking and ‘pointing’ at something just outside the aviary. Poking among the long grass in that direction, I finally discovered a small crashed bat at the foot of the wire mesh. I found this distressing; the pipistrelle was a delightful creature, and one wing was hopelessly broken. Mumble was clearly hoping that I would discover my inner Nero; I rebuked her, shocked, and – wincingly – put the little thing out of its misery.

  * * *

  Why didn’t I feel equally sentimental about the rodents that occasionally wandered into the aviary, through the thick grass and weeds that I allowed to grow up both inside and outside the mesh?

  To me, Mumble was a delightful pet; to any field mouse or bank vole that happened to look up during its last two seconds of life, she was an unspeakable nightmare – huge against the sky, lightning-fast, utterly silent, with great staring eyes and eight enormous talons reaching wide enough to envelop its head or grip halfway around its body. When she hit one like a truck she compressed the whole power of her foot, leg and chest muscles into the minute surface area of her claws. Immediately, she would crush the skull or bite down to break the neck; at least they must have died almost instantaneously. I suspect that I might have been tempted to react differently if I had ever seen them alive in their last moments, but in fact the only evidence of their fate that I ever got to see was after the deed was done (and sometimes the only trace of mouse-icide was a suspiciously dark-coloured pellet the following day).

  Of course, I had no way of knowing how many kills Mumble made, since she must often have disposed of the evidence before I saw it. Every now and then, when I went out to say hello to her after getting home from London on a spring or summer evening, I would find her sitting on her private perch like a feathery Buddha, four-square and solidly planted, breast puffed out, with a preoccupied, upturned face and slitted eyes – and with a small tail dangling from the corner of her half-open beak. On one of these occasions she was having such trouble swallowing this al fresco meal that she actually bounced up and down on her heels while trying to gulp it down. I found myself laughing out loud, and could feel nothing but pleasure that Mumble was tasting at least one of the satisfactions of an owl’s natural life.

  * * *

  Diary: 22 July

  Drama this morning. For some extraordinary reason, a thrush squeezed its way in through the feeding-hole of the aviary, and got a shocking surprise when it discovered who lived there. Mobbing was one thing, but mobbing close up and single-handed quite another. Mumble was horrified by all the thrashing about and screaming, and flew from perch to perch to keep away from the wretched thing. Eventually I had to put her in her basket and take her into the kitchen, returning to chase the hysterical thrush out of the aviary door before bringing the owl out again. Once I had expelled the suicidal fool Mumble behaved with dignity, being too embarrassed to refer again to this unfortunate incident.

  29 July

  It’s a drowsy summer teatime, and I’m enjoying it in a deckchair. Some time ago I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, and turned to see a large and characteristically fearless grey squirrel hopping down the lawn, pausing to grab the occasional snack. It then ran up the fence beside the oak tree, from there to the tree trunk, and skittered up to the first branch. Mumble was on her doorstep perch, motionless, and following it with big eyes; she was her usual rotund shape, not in the tall, thin cos-lettuce format she adopts when expecting serious trouble. On the fence-top close to the oak trunk sat Buster the cat. He looked up longingly at the squirrel, but couldn’t convince himself to try to climb after it – long experience has probably taught him the futility of following squirrels up trees.

  The three animals held this tableau for moments on end. It’s odd, but there’s no question about it: Mumble still reacts to any other cat that comes into the garden with a gunfighter’s suspicion, but these days she seems to be almost entirely relaxed about Buster. Professional courtesy, as between lawyers?

  * * *

  To call a carnivorous animal ‘cruel’ for playing its part in Nature’s constant cycle of eat or be eaten is self-evident nonsense (so far as we know, humans are the only animals capable of conscious cruelty). But that doesn’t mean that we can be unmoved by the spectacle of suffering. Personally, I’m grateful that the wildlife cameraman’s film is edited to end as soon as the wolves bring down the young caribou – I have no desire to watch the drawn-out horror that follows until the poor creature finally dies, however natural it is.

  While I never had any illusions about Mumble’s true nature, she did not give me a real demonstration of it until a quiet, sunny Saturday afternoon one May, when a large wood pigeon was eating a newly seeded patch of my lawn. I clapped and shooed it off, repeatedly, but it always came back – until it made the fateful mistake of landing on the mesh roof of the aviary. Mumble had been dozing in her usual shaded private corner next to her hutch, camouflaged by the thick ivy above and on two sides, but by now she was fully alert. As the pigeon settled on her roof she came out of cover in a killing rush, did a mid-air back-flip below it, and struck up through the mesh at it with both feet.

  She got most of her talons deep into the pigeon’s body, and hung there belly to belly with it, supported by her gently beating wings. Both birds were silent, but Mumble was open-beaked with excitement, and increasingly spattered from feet to face with ruby-red blood that glinted in the sunlight. The mesh in between the two birds prevented a clean kill, and Mumble’s locked claws prevented the pigeon escaping. This stalemate might have lasted all afternoon; I couldn’t allow such a medieval death, so I dispatched the pigeon with an air-rifle pellet through the head. Persuading Mumble to let go of it took a long time, but eventually she got tired of hanging on her back in mid-air, and I took the remains into the aviary for her.

  She pounced on the corpse avidly and started trying to butcher it, but with little success. City tawnies catch feral pigeons, but this big wood pigeon was a larger kill than a rural tawny would normally make in the wild, with tougher feathers (countrymen will tell you tales of hearing their shotgun pellets rattling off a pigeon’s wings at long range). Mumble was not really trained for dealing with a bounty like this. She repeatedly stood on it and tried to pluck a bit of it with her beak, but it kept rolling over and spilling her off. She did eventually pluck and eat about 20 per cent of it, but by the Sunday afternoon she had given it up as a bad job, and I tossed the rest into the bottom of the hedge for one of her less fastidious four-footed colleagues to find.

  * * *

  Nowadays real intimacies were limited to the lazy weekend mornings when we shared the kitchen, preening each other and enjoying each other’s company for a couple of hours at a time. I still took great delight in this, and was relieved that at most times of the year it did not take more than a few minutes for us to reforge our mutual closeness, even after five-day intervals when – like a busy couple working different shifts – we really only saw one another when we passed in the doorway morning and evening.

  In December 1982 this semi-detached relationship was tested to the full when I spent a month away in Cape Town, courtesy of my generous friends Angus and Patricia. (I was ready for it, being unwell after a period of insane overwork following the Falklands War. As a professional editor, I cannot resist boasting about one of the symptoms – I had begun to leave blood on the typewriter keys …) The month passed in a pleasant haze of late lie-ins, cool wine, and long, rambling conversations in warm sunshine amid the jacaranda trees and bougainvillea, on a hillside above the sparkling blue of the Indian Ocean. I also enjoyed several evenings in a pub that I later discovered is well known to many long-distance travellers – the Brass Bell, in the old railway station on the ocean front at Kalk Bay. Some of these sessions of beer, steaks and rock-’n’-roll were happily spent with my nephew Graham, who had made the trip the hard way, riding a motorb
ike all the way from Hampshire to the Cape of Good Hope.

  Meanwhile, Mumble was spending the whole month in her aviary, where she was faithfully fed by my kind neighbours – at some risk to their fingers when poking her chicks through the feeding hole (she was too impatient to wait until the mail had actually dropped through the letterbox). I had feared that this long separation might lead to a permanent estrangement, but when I came home she knew me the moment I came in sight, and when I went inside the aviary she jumped to my shoulder at once. I had no trouble persuading her to get into the basket, or to spend the next several hours free in the kitchen while we got to know one another again. She went around the room whooping into all possible holes and re-exploring the nooks and crannies, before settling happily on her perch on top of the larder cupboard.

  * * *

  My working life changed quite radically in the mid-1980s, when a colleague and I started up our own publishing company. At first we produced a military history magazine, and later a growing list of books, from an attic office high above Gerrard Street in London’s Chinatown. As anybody who has tried it knows, launching an underfunded infant business and trying to steer it through choppy economic seas is about the scariest and most relentlessly demanding occupation on earth (excepting, of course, those that involve live ammunition). With these added responsibilities my working days grew longer and more intense, punctuated by business trips such as the obligatory, health-wrecking October week at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

  Still, Mumble and I continued to make much of one another during our weekend sessions, especially during the summer moulting season. At other times of the year, particularly the winter months when she would have been mating and nesting, she might be aloof, or might even briefly relive her roughest ‘teenage’ behaviour. It was on an evening during one of these latter periods that I fell prey – ridiculously – to a combination of too much red wine and a momentary mood of insecurity about our relationship.

  On a still, cold, starry night I had fetched Mumble to bring her indoors, and was walking up the garden carrying her basket. When I had gone into the aviary she had been stand-offish, but not belligerent. Suddenly, I was seized by a mad impulse to test her true feelings. (Yes, I know – there was no excuse; life had long ago taught me that this sort of thing is always a bad idea.) I stopped, opened the basket and encouraged her to jump on my shoulder. We stood there together for perhaps ten seconds, while she looked around at what must surely have been a perfect night for an owl. Then she kicked herself into the air, and flew up to a branch of the old plum tree about 6 feet above me.

  She seemed calm just sitting there, so, with my heart in my mouth, I walked very slowly away and went indoors, leaving the back door open behind me. During the next very long minute or two I called myself several kinds of fool. Why, in the name of sanity, had I deliberately put myself back in the same situation as on that awful night in London many years ago? What would happen if she heard an irresistible rustling in the grass in the next field – or if another owl called nearby?

  Then there was a quiet rush of beating wings, and she flew straight in through the door and on to my shoulder again. All right – it was suppertime on a cold night, and she was no fool; but in my relieved pleasure at feeling her feathers against my cheek again I chose to tell myself that she had acted out of more than simple hunger.

  * * *

  And so our years together in Sussex rolled by and accumulated, and I find that I was seldom making diary entries during this period. Mumble’s routines of life as a country lady were well established, and with the exception of keeping a log of her moults and seasonal mood-swings I only felt the need to jot down observations if she did or experienced something (or ate somebody) unusual.

  She was a familiar presence in our lane, and my nearest neighbours told me that they liked hearing the reassuring country sound of her occasional calls. Once or twice I noticed local children trying to peer across the garden fences or through the field-hedge to look at her. On these occasions I would tell them to get their parents to ring and arrange a convenient time for me to invite them all into the garden to meet Mumble properly, and to get the ‘induction lecture’ about Tawny Owls. Like me, not all of them had grown up in the country; their first exclamation was always ‘Aaah! – isn’t it lovely!’, and their first question was always ‘What does it eat?’ (They were also unfailingly amazed to hear that Mumble enjoyed taking regular baths.)

  When I went into the aviary on these occasions she would fly to my shoulder for reassurance, landing rather hard; the presence of strangers always agitated her, and after a moment she would usually pounce forwards to cling, with wings fanning, to the wire mesh closest to them, which usually made them jump. I would use this opportunity to stress that she was very much a one-man bird – and still a wild animal, not a big brown budgerigar. When the kids dispersed I got the impression that there would be a certain amount of boasting when they got to school the next day, but I did not give this as much thought as perhaps I should have done.

  10

  Departure

  BY FEBRUARY 1993 Mumble was approaching her fifteenth birthday; she was not visibly ageing in appearance or vigour, and her behaviour seemed unchanged over several years past. The longest-lived Tawny Owl in captivity reached an astonishing twenty-seven years, and there seemed no reason to doubt that Mumble – safe, sheltered and well fed – would get a fair crack at that record.

  (I used to tell friends that I had a fantasy about eventually retiring to a house with a tower, in which I would set up my study. I liked the idea of peasants walking home from the fields at night past the dark tower with just one lit room at the top, and crossing themselves nervously when they saw the silhouette of a bearded figure with an owl on his shoulder – ideally, against a background of flickering green flames. If you are going to be old, you might as well be scary.)

  The notebook records that on 5 February that year Mumble showed the expected first signs of the restlessness that I had noted during previous annual mating seasons. During the winter months since October she had behaved towards me in a generally uninvolved way, and weekend caresses had only been permitted after quite lengthy ‘refamiliarization training’. She had usually been quite calm; but when I went into the aviary that evening she did a mild demonstration of what I noted in shorthand as ‘HHS’ (hooting and head-shot). She repeated the hooting and the jump to my head when I let her out of the night cage on the morning of the 6th, but when I lifted her down on my arm she didn’t do the whistling war-dance that would have added ‘plus WWD’ to my note. Instead, she sat quietly in the crook of my elbow and allowed me to nuzzle her head for a bit before she flew up to her perch.

  From a couple of weeks later, there is a note that when I opened her night cage in the kitchen on the morning of Saturday 23 February, Mumble flew straight out and landed on my head, but she allowed herself to be lifted down at once, and there was no arm-kicking. After she had gone through her cycle of exploring the room, crapping from the tray-perch, stretching and having a rudimentary grooming session, I was delighted to discover that she was in the mood to enjoy a more thorough preening, sitting on my lap and holding her head up to be rubbed.

  Later, while I was eating my fry-up, she was marching around at the far end of the long kitchen table, kicking up unpaid bills like autumn leaves, when she decided that she wanted to be on my shoulder. It would only have taken her a hop and half a wingbeat to cover the yard between us, but instead she chose to walk it – right across my Full English. Crooning softly, she then climbed up my chest, leaving a line of fried-eggy footprints up my bathrobe, before settling down to lean contentedly against my ear. (‘Good grief, Mumble …’)

  Diary: 25 March 1993

  Mumble died last night in the aviary.

  It was a crisp, starry night. I had gone out to her at about midnight, but she showed no interest in coming indoors, so I fed her in the aviary and left her to it. She had grabbed the chick and carried it around for a whil
e in her beak, bugling defiantly.

  When I went out to see her in the morning before leaving for London, I found the aviary door pulled wide open. There was no padlock (what a complacent idiot I was), but it was fastened with a sturdy, stiffly fitting hook-and-hasp that needed positive force with two hands to open it; neither the strongest wind nor any animal could have opened the door like this. Mumble was nowhere to be seen, and I felt an immediate suspicion. I had noticed in the press that some sort of animal rights group was publicizing this as a ‘week of action’, and I wondered at once if some ignorant sentimentalist might be to blame, rather than a would-be thief. I had heard nothing during the night; but then, I had slept right through the 1987 hurricane, and my bedroom was at the front of the house. I was completely confident that if anyone but I had tried to go into the aviary Mumble would have attacked them furiously out of the darkness, and I allowed myself to hope that the intruder had received a usefully educational fright, plus eight deep gashes to the scalp.