The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (5 page)

In the wild this parental favouritism is particularly marked in years when prey is scarce; it gives the greatest chance that at least one robust hatchling will survive in good shape to face the huge challenges of fending for itself during its first autumn and winter. Tawny owlets may look adorable (unlike the rather vulturine babies of the Barn Owl), but any raptor’s nest is as mercilessly competitive an arena as the wild woodlands, and it is quite common for one or more of the later hatchlings to perish there. Nature being Nature – and the appetite of their siblings being insatiable – these unlucky early losers in life’s race are not allowed to go to waste.

There also seems to be some folklore about the first egg usually being female, since female tawnies grow bigger than males. This question of gender is problematic, since there is no way of sexing a young owl without intrusive and very expert examination, or even subjecting it to X-rays. In common with other birds, owls have no external genitalia, and while a mature hen bird may weigh 25 per cent more than a cock, young tawnies show no obvious gender
differences in size or coloration. (Although I decided to assume that my tawny was female, it was in fact only when she was a couple of years old that I became convinced, by a particular behaviour, that she was indeed a ‘she’. But it would be ridiculous to describe her as ‘it’ up to that point in this story, so ‘she’ she is, throughout.)

* * *

Early in April 1978 the report came through that ‘my’ egg had been laid, removed from the nest and placed in an incubator. About four weeks later I was told that the owlet had hatched successfully, and was being hand-reared by the breeder’s small son. During these first weeks a hatchling needs repeated hand-feeding, several times a day, with something fairly gloopy on the end of a matchstick. I was further informed that when the little boy had asked his dad what he should call the owlet, and had been told to name it after something that he really liked, he thought for a moment, and then announced that its name was ‘Marmite Sandwich’.

At last the day came, on a gloriously sunny Saturday late in May, when I drove down to Water Farm to begin the second chapter of my involvement with owls. It was a thoughtful drive. A small, doubting voice from a joyless corner of my mind kept asking me if I really knew what I was letting myself in for, again – the mess, the inconvenience, the complication to my social life, and all probably leading only to another disappointment. Why not be pragmatic and simply admit that I wasn’t an animal person?
Usually the swoop down Bluebell Hill with half of Kent laid out below me was enough to raise my spirits on the gloomiest day, but on that sunlit Saturday I never noticed it at all.

One of the relaxing things about arriving at Water Farm was the lack of reaction it usually caused. There was no reception committee; you tended to encounter various members of the family one by one, scattered about the place and busy with their own concerns, whether having a mug of coffee under the willow tree beside the duck pond or doing something rural to a sheep’s feet in the paddock. In time, a pause in the sound of grinding and drilling from behind the old tractor shed would signal that Dick was taking a break from performing open-heart surgery on something rusty that had been written off by the US Army in 1945. I always found this interval restful, because it gave me time to get the motorway hum out of my brain and readjust to human conversation. That Saturday my arrival caused the usual lack of excitement, and there was nothing at all to warn me that I was walking towards a momentous encounter.

Me: ‘Where is it?’

Dick: ‘In the kitchen.’

The door straight into the big farmhouse kitchen stood open, as usual, and I stepped into the cool shadow. Wol, dozing on his perch high up on top of the dresser, ignored me. I looked around, expecting to see the usual cardboard grocery box somewhere and to hear the usual frightened scuttling of claws inside it as I approached. No scuttling; no box.

Perched on the back of a sunlit chair by the open window was something about 9 inches tall and shaped rather like a plump toy penguin with a nose-job. It appeared to be wearing a one-piece knitted jumpsuit of pale grey fluff with brown stitching, with a balaclava helmet attached. From the face-hole of the fuzzy balaclava, two big, shiny black eyes gazed up at me trustfully. ‘
Kweep
,’ it said quietly. Enchanted, I leaned closer. It blinked its furry grey eyelids, then jumped very deliberately up on to my right shoulder. It felt like a big, warm dandelion head against my cheek, and it smelt like a milky new kitten. ‘
Kweep
,’ it repeated, very softly.

* * *

On the Sunday evening we drove back to London together. There had been no need to ask Dick’s help in fitting jesses; I had sworn to myself that this bird would never be tethered, and would come to me of her own free will or not at all. The owlet started the journey in a cardboard box, but soon escaped and climbed up to my shoulder. She adapted herself to this revolutionary new experience with complete calm. By the time we were halfway home she had learned to lean into the corners for balance, occasionally taking a delicate beak-grip on the rim of my ear to steady herself.

Love at first sight – when it hits you late, it hits hard. It hit me at thirty-four, and I was a slave to it for the next fifteen years.

IN TERMS OF
traceable evolution, my Tawny Owl sprang from a hugely more ancient lineage than you and I, and if she had had room in her close-packed little skull for speculative thought she would have had every right to look down on humanity as pathetically slow learners.

We know much less about the evolution of birds than about that of most other classes of animals, because their flimsy bones rarely survive as fossils, and even those that do are extremely difficult to identify. It is accepted that birds originally evolved from small reptiles during the age of the dinosaurs, though the process by which this happened remains a matter of academic debate. The oldest evidence for this specialization has long been recognized as
Archaeopterix
, of which a group of several sharply delineated fossils were found in Germany in the nineteenth century. These have been dated to the Upper Jurassic period, about 160 million years ago (when the age of the dinosaurs still had about 95 million years to run). The crow-sized
Archaeopterix
has a reptilian skull with toothed jaws, but a skeleton that shows both reptilian and avian
characteristics; most strikingly, it undeniably has feathered wings, but also a long reptilian tail fringed with feathers. (More recently a chicken-sized fossil that came to light in China in the 1990s, christened
Xiaotingia
, and showing feathers on all four limbs and the tail, has been claimed as an even older creature.) But the subsequent series of adaptations that linked these creatures with today’s birds – if, indeed, such direct links existed – represent a vast jigsaw puzzle of which we have identified only a very small number of the pieces. Evolution is a process punctuated by unknown numbers of dead ends, and many known fossils are those of species that later became extinct without leaving any identifiable descendants.

However, we do know that when our own most distant probable ancestor, the proto-hominid
Australopithecus afarensis
(familiarly known as ‘Lucy’), emerged on to the savannah in the Horn of Africa at some time around 3.5 million years ago, the dawn-mother of the owls,
Protostrix
, had already been part of the fossil record in what is now North America for at least 50 million years.
Protostrix
had appeared during the Eocene era, long before the tectonic plates that underlie our continents had slid into their present positions. The last of the dinosaurs had died out some 15 million years before
Protostrix
laid down her imprint in the shale-mud, at a time when both the birds that had evolved from some of the smaller reptiles, and the small mammals that these birds preyed upon, were diversifying and spreading through the forests and grasslands that covered much of the planet.

Unimaginable periods of time then passed while evolution carried out its infinitely slow series of branching experiments, filtering the genetic legacies of the flying hunters. By the Pleistocene period, ‘only’ some 3 million years ago, this process had produced something that was definitely a Tawny Owl.
Strix aluco
is one of about thirty of the most ancient species of the family
Strigidae
that are still recognizable today, among many more recent arrivals. That the Tawny Owl continued to survive the ceaseless process of competitive species-sorting argues that by 3 million years ago it had already adapted well to its environment, becoming the master of a particular niche of opportunity in the food chain. This, remember, was at a time when our own hairy, dwarfish ancestors were still coming to terms with walking on their back legs, and were still at least half a million years from discovering the potential benefits of deliberately banging rocks together.

The exact sequence of relationships in mankind’s family tree remains a matter of debate, since a number of the trial-and-error sketches for a future human being that have been revealed by fossil finds seem to overlap in period rather than representing successive stages in the process. About a million years after Lucy, some 2.3 million years ago, a still ape-like creature called
Homo habilis
had a brain about half again the size of hers, and was definitely using stone tools. By 1.8 million years ago
Homo erectus
, the first undoubted member of our own lineage, was on the scene in eastern Africa – taller, straighter, less furry, and with a brain that continued to grow in size, slowly but steadily,
over hundreds of thousands of years; the rock-banging was now getting more ambitious and sophisticated. At some unknown time a number of families of this upwardly mobile species migrated from Africa into the Middle East, and began their slow colonization of the rest of the planet.

From about 800,000 years ago the enlargement of
Homo erectus
’s brain speeded up remarkably, presumably in response to the challenge of dramatic and repeated changes in climate and environment. By just 120,000 years ago (in evolutionary time, the blink of an eye), we –
Homo sapiens
– were jostling our way ahead of the competition to challenge the brawnier and equally large-brained
Homo neanderthalensis
, but it was a mere 28,000 years ago when the last Neanderthals disappeared from ice-bound Europe. (What gave us the edge may have been as simple as the bone needle: apparently we had it, so we could sew hides into warm clothing, but Neanderthals didn’t.) As a parting souvenir of interbreeding they bequeathed us about 4 per cent of our DNA, but they left us as the final champions in the long marathon of primate evolution. We now had a brain more than three times the size of Lucy’s, a truly upright stance, a skeleton evolved for long-distance running, strong opposable thumbs, and a gut that could cope with a wide variety of foodstuffs. Together these gave us such unparalleled adaptability that – though comparatively weak, and pathetically slow to leave our mothers and breed – we were able to survive or sidestep many of the basic daily challenges that mercilessly cull each generation of our fellow inhabitants of the Earth.

Meanwhile, throughout this whole glacially slow process, Tawny Owls had been contentedly staking out territories, catching their supper and making baby Tawny Owls. Unlike us, they had not had to adapt in any major way; working from a 50-million-year-old basic template, Nature finally got them right 3 million years ago, producing a magnificently structured and equipped killer living in complete harmony with its environment. So long as the Earth still has breathable air, killable prey and perching places well above ground, they could theoretically carry on being Tawny Owls for eons into the future. (In the narrow terms of comparative evolution, they might therefore be characterized as a ‘dead end’; but their inability to compose orchestral symphonies or manufacture thermonuclear weapons does not seem to handicap them much.)

* * *

To a curious child’s reasonable question, ‘What are owls
for
?’, the easiest answer is that they are something like cats that can fly, which enables them to share the cat’s work at night. (There seems to be a weird sort of rightness in Edward Lear’s pairing of the two creatures in a loving relationship in his nonsense poem ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’.) In the infinitely interconnected web of life on Earth, owls fill the job opportunity that occurs every night when the daytime hunting birds go to sleep. These night-shift workers are an essential part of the mechanisms that keep the population numbers of the Earth’s creatures in some sort of sustainable balance. We might even tell the
child that without owls, farmers would be up to their necks in rats and mice.

More seriously, when the child gets older and is still curious, we might explain what it is that sets an owl apart from other birds. The defining characteristics of the avian order of
Strigiformes
are large, forward-facing eyes – more than twice as big as those of other birds of comparable size – and very well-developed ears, which together enable them to hunt live prey in what we would (mistakenly) call absolute darkness.