The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (20 page)

By muscular action under her skin, Mumble could not only clench or splay the feathers on various parts of her body at will, she could also move whole groups or ‘armour panels’ around independently of other groups. When she ducked to grab at a feather low on the left or right side of her belly and preened it upwards, then that whole half of her front was lifted out of shape in a single mat, while the other side remained flat. This ‘panelled’ effect was very noticeable in the shawl of scapular feathers at the top of her back, which overlaid the rear edges of her folded wings. This shawl usually looked like a single assembly, but occasionally I would see her separating it into left and right halves. She could shrug it far round to either side for preening, and it opened up and lifted out of the way as she spread her wings. When she folded them again, the shawl was puffed out and half extended until the wings were furled tightly against her body under it. Then she gave a little wriggling shake as she dropped it and closed it over the joins, fairing everything smoothly into a single, apparently continuous surface.

On these and many other occasions, it struck me that my flatmate was not simply beautiful; she was a supremely elegant example of functional natural design.

THE MOST IMPORTANT
daily milestones in Mumble’s routine were naturally the simple necessities of life: feeding, digesting the bits that were nutritious, evacuating the waste products that weren’t, and grooming herself to keep her feathers in perfect order. Any waking time left over from these essential tasks was spent in keeping a beady eye on her surroundings, and – particularly in her younger years – in playing ‘war-games’.

* * *

Ever since she arrived in the flat she had been able to swallow a chick whole, so I could forget the repellent task of scissoring them in half that I had had to perform for Wellington. Since a rough estimate of her body weight suggested that she needed about 4 ounces of food daily, the basic ration pack was two chicks. (This was not invariable, because even the European Union has not yet enforced regulations demanding that chicks come in perfectly standard sizes.) Usually I fed her these last thing at night, but later I slipped into the habit of dividing them between
supper and breakfast. My notebooks don’t explain this; it may have been her idea, but I suspect that it was so that I had a means of tempting her to get into the basket for transit to the balcony cage on the mornings when I had a commuter train to catch and she was playing hard to get. (At the time I never gave any further thought to this, but much later I realized that I must have been duplicating the time she spent on digestion each day. Luckily this seemed to do her no harm, since she sometimes simply chose to leave part of a chick on one side as a snack for later; but it played hell with my already doomed attempts to calculate when – and therefore where – she would defecate.)

On our first few nights together I had tossed the suppertime ration into her kitchen cage as a way of luring her in there for the nightly lock-up, but this very quickly became unnecessary. As soon as I whistled, or took thawed chicks out of the fridge and dunked them in hot water to take the chill off, she flew straight into the cage and sat impatiently waiting for me to serve them up, often with a little chitter of eagerness. If I offered a breakfast chick when she was already in the balcony cage, she leaned forwards so impatiently and so far that she had to spread and flap her wings for balance, half hovering at an angle of 45 degrees but with her feet still clutching the perch. In this gargoyle posture, she snatched the chick with her beak, making metallic chitterings with her mouth full as she wound her body back through the air to a stable base. Then she transferred the chick to one foot and held it in
her talons for a while, looking around, before jumping down to her shelf and bending her head to start feeding. If she happened to let it slip and it fell to the floor of the cage, she dropped like a stone and stood guard over it, mantling her wings above it protectively and glaring fiercely around before seizing it again and carrying it back to the perch.

Mumble didn’t object to my watching her eating, being wholly absorbed in the business of holding the chick down with one foot while dipping her head repeatedly to tear chunks off it. After each bite she would raise her head again with her face upturned, to straighten her throat and ease the swallowing process. She seemed to close her eyes as she bent down, and half opened them to slits as she reared up to swallow her mouthful down with a couple of big gulps. She often left the legs until last, and the occasional sight of her eating them from the thick end was mildly disturbing – she ended up with a little, vaguely humanoid ‘hand’, or even a pair of them, sticking out of the corners of her bill until they disappeared with a final couple of gulps. When she had finished eating she usually ‘feeked’ – stropped both sides of her beak against a perch, presumably to clean it of drying blood and yolk. (She also often used to bite and rub at her perches between meals, presumably out of an instinct to keep her beak honed down; if the upper mandible grows into too long a hook it may impale the food awkwardly. The pinewood edge of Mumble’s big tray-perch was a favourite whetting-stone.)

Mumble’s interest in her food even seemed to extend to
the logistic side of things. On one occasion she was free in the kitchen while I was reloading the freezer cabinet with day-old chicks from a sack. She paid very close attention, sitting at first on my shoulder, and watching with what seemed to be rapt interest as I counted them into plastic bags. When I opened the freezer door she jumped to the top edge of it, head between her feet, watching the passage of each bag as I stacked them inside (I had a mental picture of her holding a clipboard and pen, ticking the bags off on a loading manifest). When I finished stacking the cabinet with a rock face of plastic-wrapped chicks, she even tried to get inside with them, clinging on to the icy ledge at the bottom and flapping her wings for balance.

You may hear it said that birds of prey do not drink, getting all the moisture they need from their food, but nobody who holds that opinion has ever shared quarters with an owl. When Mumble was out in her balcony cage I would quite often catch sight of her sitting on the edge of her water dish and dipping her head down between her toes. She would delicately scoop up sips of water and then tip her head back to let them slip down, visibly swallowing, with her throat working and eyes blinking. One evening in her second year I walked into the kitchen to discover her sitting on the edge of the washing-up bowl in the sink and moving her head around under a dripping tap, letting the drops fall gently into her open beak. After this I would sometimes deliberately leave the tap dripping for her, with a sponge placed below it to stop the noise driving me crazy.

* * *

No honest account of life with an owl can ignore what we might delicately call ‘the disgusting bits’.

Unlike daytime raptors, owls have no crop or ‘storage cupboard’ in their throat, but a two-stage stomach. Since birds have no teeth and cannot chew their food they swallow it whole, and this means that fledglings have to learn to tear their prey into swallowable chunks. While Mumble managed her habitual chicken dinners efficiently, in later years after we moved to the countryside she was sometimes over-ambitious with the unfamiliar prey that she occasionally caught for herself ‘on the hoof’. The sign that she might be regretting her greed was an apparently uncomfortable immobility, sitting ramrod-straight on her perch with eyes slitted and upturned face stretched tight, and somebody’s tail protruding from her half-open beak.

Once successfully swallowed, the food passes into the ‘pre-stomach’, where strong acids and enzymes break it down. As already mentioned, to power its demanding lifestyle an owl needs roughly 20 per cent of its body weight in food every day, so the digestion process has to be relatively fast and simple to clear the way for the next meal. The hard or indissoluble parts – bones, teeth, beaks, insect wing-cases, fur and feathers – then pass down into a gizzard or ‘lower stomach’, where, to save time, they are formed into pellets for regurgitation. (It is sometimes assumed that only raptors produce pellets, but in fact hundreds of species
of birds do this – in Britain, for instance, these include not only kingfishers and herons, but also rooks, starlings, tree sparrows and even robins.) Meanwhile, the useful bits are absorbed for nutrition, and – inevitably – that produces waste that has to be excreted.

Since birds do not have a separate bladder for urine (one of the many weight-saving modifications to their innards), an owl’s ‘unified’ droppings are a strongly acidic, foul-smelling brown-and-white sludge. This is expelled backwards horizontally, with some force – a procedure known to falconers as ‘slicing’, which resembles a tobacco-chewer spitting out a thick stream of evil brown juice. Anyone carrying a bird on their fist quickly learns to keep half an eye at all times on the direction in which its tail is pointing – and particularly when innocent civilians step up close to admire it. Since you only get between two and three seconds’ warning, it’s important to be alert for the signs of imminent action: a slight crouch, a thoughtful expression, followed immediately by tails-up, a parting of the fluff, and – ‘
Torpedo los!
’

I used to try in vain to work out at roughly what times of day, in relation to her feeds, Mumble was likely to slice, but it was hopeless. I was slightly more successful in figuring out the probable danger areas around the flat, laying copious newspapers on the floor and spreading thin plastic sheets around. The most obvious ‘ground zero’ was a radius around her favourite perches, but she sometimes fooled me with her insouciant timing, and I simply had to accept that stains, scrubbing and subsequent patches of
bleaching on the living-room carpet were inevitable. (Luckily, it was cheap and I had never liked the colour anyway.) My willingness to pay this price for living with an owl was probably the eccentricity that my urban friends found hardest to understand.

By contrast with this unavoidably unpleasant business, the pelleting (so useful to scientists researching owl diets and distribution) was a sedate affair. In the gizzard the indigestible parts of the prey were neatly formed into a short, sausage-shaped parcel wrapped in the tightly packed debris of fur or feather, which passed back up to the pre-stomach. There it remained for several hours before being re gurgitated. In the wild this usually happens while the owl is roosting during the day, and the textbooks say that during the digestive process no new prey can be swallowed – a fact that I was slow to pick up on, so (as mentioned) Mumble often got her rations divided between supper and breakfast. Nevertheless, she seemed able to shuffle it all around internally without discomfort.

The signal that Mumble was contemplating bringing up a pellet began with her yawning widely; then she would bow low, and shake her head vigorously from side to side at a rate of four or five shakes per second. She would then pause, sit upright for a couple of seconds, and then bow and give another rapid series of head-shakes. She repeated this whole sequence perhaps four or five times, and then gave a series of huge yawns – every ten seconds or so, over up to a minute at a time. After a further series of head-shakes in an upright stance, she might forget the whole
thing, as if deciding that she had gone off the boil for now – like a human misled by an apparently imminent sneeze that stubbornly refuses to happen. But if she was ready, then she would bow again, close her eyes, shake her head – and the pellet would drop neatly out of her beak. There was no gagging or spitting reflex; the pellet would not appear during a yawn, but during one of her sideways head-shakes. Given her almost exclusive diet of chicks, the smooth pellets were yellowish-grey; the initial slick of moisture dried off fast, and there was nothing at all distasteful about handling them.

This process did not seem to require much concentration, or to make Mumble feel vulnerable or self-conscious. If I happened to walk past while she was yawning or shaking her head, she might occasionally hop down to my shoulder and carry on there, as if nothing remarkable was occurring.

* * *

Mumble clearly got as much sensual pleasure from stretching as any other animal does.

Standing on a perch that gave her a good deal of clear space behind her feet, she would balance on one leg and lean slightly towards that side. Then she would slowly and deliberately stretch the other wing out and downwards, her primary and secondary feathers spreading like fingers, while simultaneously stretching that leg and foot downwards inside the wing, with the toes splayed apart. After holding this pose for a couple of seconds, she would gently
furl up the wing, return that foot to the perch, lean to the other side, and repeat the performance with her other wing and leg. When she was centred once more, she would crouch forwards with her head over her toes, and crook both wings stiffly up above her back in symmetrical L-shapes bent at the ‘wrist’, as if she was imitating the eagle standard of a Roman legion. Finally, she would stand upright again, shrug her refolded wings into place comfortably, and give her body feathers a settling shake. She was once doing a wing-stretch as I walked through the door below her; simultaneously, she squeaked at me, continued the stretch, and was gripped by a sudden urge to yawn cavernously. This made her look rather like a cartoon opera singer making a hugely theatrical gesture as she reached her top note (though Mumble’s came out like the squawk of a tin trumpet).