My Natural History (20 page)

23. Barn owl

Tyto alba

W
hen I was ten I won a Highly Commended
certificate
in a poetry competition that involved, I think, the entire borough of Wandsworth, or at least, the primary schools therein. It was the peak of my achievement as a poet, though I carried on gamely for another dozen years.

I think we can all agree that Highly Commended was generous in the circumstances. But I include these all-
too-mortal
lines as proof that the barn owl had always haunted me.

It is almost the literal truth: for barn owls are
ghost-birds
, wraith-birds, spook-owls, traditionally associated with fading light, pale birds with baby faces that come into being with the gathering dark, crossing the countryside on soundless wings, living in abandoned dwellings; birds with a taste for ruins, whose un-bird-like, un-man-like, un-living-thing-like screech signals the arrival of the night and the time of fear.

Barn owls were my passion. I knew I would never see one, any more than I would see a unicorn, but the haunting of my imagination was as meaningful to me as the
haunting
of any buildings. There was a photograph that helped a great deal with the haunting process.

It was, like the marsh harrier picture mentioned earlier, taken by the great primordial bird photographer Eric Hosking, a man who was to lose his eye to an owl that resented his presence, though this was a tawny, not a barn. Hosking called his autobiography
An Eye For A Bird
.

The image, captured in 1934, became a classic: a flat white human face, sphinx-like, Buddha-like, as wise or as sinister as human imagination could make it, carrying in its beak a careless rat; or, to be more accurate, a careless
short-tailed field vole. The face human, the wings angelic, the appetite bestial: what more does the imagination need to feed on?

But for me, barn owls were never sinister. I rather prided myself on that. They were part of the natural world, and if they made a spooky call, that was not because barn owls were spooks but because humans tended to get spooked. If the life of a barn owl is alien to our own, then it is the more to be cherished. For me, the fascination of barn owls lay not in their supernatural possibilities, in an anthropomorphic understanding of their natures, in fear, in superstition, in anything at all to do with imposed human ideas: no, my imagination was fired by the thought of these pale silent killers leading their serious lives remote from human understanding.

At one stage of my childhood, I designed my own coat of arms. I had a brief craze on heraldry and learned all the magic words and some of the magical meaning of the bend or baton sinister, the stag trippant attired, the eagle displayed, the lion rampant gules. I prepared my escutcheon with some care, ready for the day when I was given a knighthood by an admiring monarch: argent, a fess gules, in chief three barn owl heads proper. Barn owls for their beauty, barn owls for my imagination, barn owls for Barnes. I never thought I’d ever see a real one.

When I returned from my time in Asia and started going to places richer in possibilities than Streatham
Common, I made a number of jaunts with my friend Tim, a decent birder who took me to some fine places just a short train ride from London. “What will we see, Tim?” “Oh, chance of black tern on the reservoir, maybe golden plover on the moor, don’t think it’s cold enough for smew… short-eared owl is almost definite… big wader numbers… diving duck… and turning home, we might pick up a barn owl in the dusk.”

Oh yes, might pick up a unicorn, might pick up a
hippogriff
, might bump into a sphinx and get asked the odd riddle. Might meet the creature of my dreams, might meet the creature that, above all others, haunted the imagination of my childhood, might meet the most beautiful, most impossible creature that ever took wing. But we never did.

When I was researching my Minsmere book, I had been told that barn owls were frequently to be seen above the Minsmere Levels: that if I looked out across the water from Island Mere Hide at dusk, I would almost certainly see one. And so I looked. Again and again, and for
extended
periods, I stared across the lovely lake, trying to coax a fleck of white into the greying sky. Impossibly distant, looking beyond the ducks and the swans, staring at a place too far for intimacy. Still, just a glimpse, just a brief appearance of a distant pale bird would be a start. Eventually, I was granted just that: yes, a white bird; yes, on arched wings; yes, unquestionably a barn owl. Not
because I could recognise it, but because it could not be anything else: it was a negative encounter, though not without its beauty. It wasn’t a sighting that brought me knowledge or understanding: just a rather piquant detail on a lovely painting: a pale wash of sky with a still paler brushstroke: on a field argent an owl argent, tantalising, teasing, thrilling enough in its way: it was a sight that increased the appetite rather than satisfied it.

Cind and I spent a good deal of time in Suffolk while I was researching the book, and when I had finished, Suffolk refused to let us go. There were elements of a
homecoming
for Cind, though it was a home she had never lived in: the barge-sailing side of her family comes from the Shotley peninsular. The Suffolk coast is something of an acquired taste: the bleakness, even in summer, can be disturbing, and it is marked by strange patches which are certainly not the sea, but are not entirely land either. But Suffolk became our place.

It was just after Christmas, and we had decided to take a few bracing days of big skies and winter waders, walks and pub meals, whisky by the fire and giggling runs into icy sheets.

We took a walk in the afternoon around the Alde
estuary
: a place of casual immensities and the same pearly light that you get in Venice. No coincidence: it’s the light of brackish lagoons, but here, instead of Tintoretto and Carpaccio, we had avocets and marsh harrier. Reeds like a
field of corn, sabled water, argent sky. And a miracle.

There before us, just a few yards away, like the richest gift ever bestowed, a barn owl. A barn owl proper. He was working the rough land beneath a grove of recently
planted
trees, perched on a pink square tree-guard and gravely surveying the rank grass beneath. We watched as he flew to another. And another. It was as if we had been given the gift not only of barn owl but of invisibility. Occasionally he dropped onto the grass. Silent, always silent, for the wings of an owl are muffled with feathers. This is not just so that the prey animals can’t hear him coming: it also means that his hearing has no interference. A barn owl locates his prey by listening: the sound of his own progress would spoil that. His ears are placed asymmetrically so that he can get a cross-bearing: he can plunge with
confidence
onto a field vole he has never seen. It’s not his
eyesight
keen that matters after all: it’s his ear-hearing keen. His earsight, perhaps. No wonder I was only Highly Commended.

We watched the owl until dusk fell, for getting on for an hour, agog, almost bewildered by the sense of privilege. Then we went back to our rented cottage, knowing that Suffolk had, with this transcendental vision of the barn owl, established an eternal claim over us. We would be back here as often as we could, despite all the things that kept us anchored to the rim of London.

Five or six years later, our house was the epicentre of
an owl chorus such as I had never heard before. It was early autumn, a time of great movements. Young owls, parted from their parents, go out to seek their fortunes: sometimes they attempt to invade a place already taken. They make enquiries: these are answered, often with great force. All these matters are discussed in sound. On this night, all these autumnal quests and movements and
challenges
seemed to happen at once. The excitement they generated stimulated every owl within hearing distance – within earsight, perhaps – no matter what his species. It was cold, but we opened all the windows of the downstairs room we were in, leaning out to try and establish number and direction, to make some kind of sense of this barrage of sound. The nearest I could come up with was seven or eight little owls, four or five barn owls and two or three tawnies. The little owls yelped. The tawnies alternated their own sounds, the wavering hoot of horror films and the sharp, dissyllabic contact call. And every so often, the barn owls gave out that extraordinary hissing roar.

We had only just moved in. For all I knew we would hear this wild chorus every year, perhaps every night in season. But no: it was a one-off: a strange coincidence of birds and night and excitement. Harry Potter had not been written, and Joe, then only three, was yet to fall under his spells, but it was a little like being in Privet Drive in the opening pages of the first book. Owls beyond
computation
: what message did they carry for us?

For now, we had moved to Suffolk and I learned almost at once that we were now in the land of the barn owl. I began to live with barn owls in terms of casual intimacy. Birds that had been fantastical creatures, mythical beings given life by my imagination, were now daily companions. I saw barn owls when walking the dog, first when she was a puppy prone to wild runs and flopping falls, now when she is a dignified old lady with an increasing taste for short cuts. I saw barn owls when I went looking for other birds. I saw barn owls when I worked with my horses. I saw barn owls from the windows of the house. I was able to
recognise
them from the smallest clue: a distant pale shape
following
the line of a hedge: a half-glimpse of the effortful, floppy wing: the somehow immensely satisfying moment when a barn owl perches, closes its pale wings and
disappears
, its brown mantle blending instantly with the
background
. The sound of their presence was always with us. They were not so frequent as to be unremarkable: they were not so infrequent as to be a surprise. They were there as a permanent validation, if you like, a proof that my imagination and the real wild world had achieved some kind of unity.

There is a barn owl box in a big oak a short way behind the house. Barn owls have roosted there. Stock doves have also bred there instead: and here, you have to put on a
serious
face and explain that stock doves, being amber-listed worldwide, are in greater danger than barn owls and are
therefore More Important. I can’t say that I wouldn’t
prefer
a family of barn owls: still, the place is there if they ever need it. Barn owls have also roosted in my barn, and left their horribly turd-like pellets on the floor.

They are on the increase in this part of Suffolk, because farmers are increasingly inclined (and subsidised) to leave areas of rough grassland where an owl can hunt for
careless
, short-tailed field voles, and also because the Suffolk Wildlife Trust has gone to some trouble to persuade
landowners
to put up barn owl boxes. With the destruction of old barns and tumbledown outbuildings, the owls have become homeless. Hollow trees that they would annex in a world without humans tend to be cut down impatiently, though two or three fields away, there is just such a tree, a venerable oak, and though the farmer has been itching for his power-saw for years, his wife won’t let him touch it. And it generally has barn owls within. There is a change taking place in the way the world understands barn owls: they were once seen as spooks and evil omens, then they were (wrongly) cast as pheasant-eating villains, but now they are admired, desired and prestigious.

Barn owls define our Suffolk lives. Joe has been
familiar
with them since he was at nursery school. Eddie can recognise them: he can sign them, making Biggles-goggles with his fingers, and say “barn owl” distinctly. Important words to master, I think.

Here, Cind and I have known joys and suffered
sadness. Here, Joe and Eddie have done and are doing their growing up. Outside, there’s lots and lots of Suffolk: and every so often, a barn owl. If you miss one, there’ll be another along soon enough, like the 49 bus that used to take me from Streatham to the Natural History Museum. I have written a lot of words in this house, pausing often to look away from my desk and out of the window. It’s not the best vantage point of the house, and barn owls are unusual at my desk, rather like inspiration. Like a barn owl, it best comes unexpected, the better to be treasured. My tamelife has always been punctuated and illustrated and spelt and narrated by my wildlife; these days there are times when the two things have at last become indistinguishable.