The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (23 page)

I parked up, and took an oh-so-casual stroll past. Naturally, the estate agent had not bothered to mention the attractive location. I couldn’t see into the back garden, but a hundred yards further on there was a footpath leading off in that direction, so I took it. I found myself climbing over a stile into an open field, and walking up along a hedgerow. The garden of ‘my’ house was of reasonable size, and was shaded by a noble oak tree; I could see that the view from the back windows would reach westwards over fields all the way to a line of green hills. As the Iron Duke is supposed to have exclaimed at the key moment during the battle of Salamanca: ‘Damn me – that’ll do!’

* * *

I immediately made an appointment to view, and found that the owners – a scientist at Sussex University and his wife – were pleasant and reasonable. The inside of the house was as satisfactory as the outside, the whole property looked owl-friendly, and – hallelujah! – the long living room even had an open, working fireplace. The asking price was realistic; it was at the top end of my range, but manageable. I found a buyer for my flat without difficulty; then all three corners of the deal entered that unavoidable limbo period during which solicitors and mortgage-brokers torture everyone concerned until you are all on the screaming edge of a nervous breakdown. Eventually, all the contracts were exchanged and money changed hands.

I had a couple of weeks’ grace between the previous owners’ moving out and my moving in, so I could make several car journeys with much of my more awkward gear before the final trip with the removal van. I also got my brother and brother-in-law to meet me there one weekend and help me construct Mumble’s new country quarters. In a leafy corner at the bottom of the garden Dick, Peter and I built a sturdy timber and Twillweld aviary rather larger than my own bedroom in the flat, complete with a box hutch in the most private corner, and a generous selection of perches giving good views in all directions (a couple of years later I would extend it by an extra yard or so). I met my new next-door neighbours, and warned them about my
housemate. They seemed pleasantly intrigued rather than suspicious, and I looked forward to leaving the jurisdiction of Attila the Caretaker for ever.

The notebooks remind me that it was on the morning of 21 August 1981 that the removal van drove off, and I took a final look around the bare, dusty flat with Mumble on my shoulder. I had lived there for about fifteen years; it held plenty of good memories, and the big, high, sunny view through the window-wall was as alluring as ever. Well, time to go; I opened the basket for Mumble, and she obediently hopped in. On the way down in the lift I perversely hoped that we would run into the caretaker, so that I could smugly reveal who had been living with me for the past three years, but we didn’t. We pulled out of the basement garage for the last time, and as we reached the open road across the old airfield Mumble made herself comfortable on the back of my seat, looking around her with interest.

During the drive I half wondered whether, when I was actually living on the edge of a Sussex village, I might find that the reality did not live up to the expectation. Was I moving because I would really enjoy living in the countryside, or simply because I thought I ought to enjoy it? I needn’t have worried. From that first night spent among the packing cases I never missed my old flat for a single moment, and on all the evidence I can’t believe that Mumble did either. For my part, I had achieved the Englishman’s basic dream of owning his own tiny patch of one of the prettiest counties in the country, with a cosy
pub just a few minutes’ walk from my door. For Mumble’s part, she had arrived on a new, green planet crowded with unsuspected fellow creatures.

IT WAS HARDLY
surprising that Mumble was disorientated by her new quarters for quite a few weeks after our move to Sussex. I could only imagine that she must be overwhelmed by the rush of new information bombarding her from every side. It was not just that her living space was larger; her surroundings were unimaginably different from her cage on the seventh-floor balcony.

For the first time – apart from her very brief visits to Water Farm – she found herself at ground level among living greenery. In the aviary her hutch and the rear mesh wall were tight against a hedgerow, from which I trained dense tendrils of ivy inside to partly shroud her private corner and nearest perch. But the hedge had grown out leggy, so she had views in that direction through the green lacework, across a field corner bordered by lines of hedges and trees. Within a few yards in two other directions there were a big oak and an old, ivy-covered plum tree, and beyond them the rest of the late-summer garden and the back of the house.

Her floor was no longer of concrete carpeted with
newspaper, but the living earth covered with grass, wildflowers and weeds growing in dappled sunlight and shadows. She was no longer living in an urban cave: above her mesh ceiling, instead of a dark, enclosing slab of concrete she had the open sky. What’s more, it was a country sky – lively with drifting clouds and flying birds by day, and by night black and jewelled, instead of being stained a dirty orange-brown by city lights.

Above all, on every surface of this whole new deep-focus environment, she was surrounded by constantly shifting patterns of miniature movements, while her ears picked up a vast range of sounds from near and far – the sounds of other living creatures, everything from insects to cows.

For Mumble to assimilate all this from hour to hour, to process it and learn appropriate responses to it, must have been both engrossing and, at first, perhaps even scary (though I doubt it – Tawny Owls don’t do fear). Throughout that September she was certainly hyperactive and distracted. She was difficult in the mornings when I let her out of the kitchen cage, and again when I took the basket out to the aviary to bring her in at night. She was also ravenous, but that may have been due simply to the season rather than any reaction to the move. I had noticed the previous September that for about three weeks she seemed much hungrier than usual, demanding chicks night and morning. Now she went into a chittering frenzy at the sight of food, and one morning she even dived straight out the opened door of the kitchen cage to snatch a chick right
out of my hand as I approached. The weather was warm, but the only logical explanation I could think of was that despite the earliness of the season she was instinctively building up her fat reserves before the year turned cold.

* * *

Inside the house, I had set up her old night cage in a convenient corner of the kitchen, beside a window but round a corner from the main part of the room. She would be within close sight of the coffee-brewing facilities, so she would see a familiar activity when I uncovered the cage in the mornings.

I had taken the decision that with a spacious new aviary Mumble would spend more time out of doors than when we had lived in the flat, and that when indoors she would no longer have the run of the place, but would be confined to the big kitchen. I would miss our shared evenings, but there were simply too many crannies in the fairly open-plan house for her to hide (and crap) in, and – more to the point – too many windows that I would have had to remember to keep closed. Above all, I must admit that I didn’t want my new home to be squalid with soiled newspapers and sheets of plastic.

The kitchen was large and, thanks to an extension, oddly U-shaped, with plenty of shelves and cupboards for her to perch on and explore, and its surfaces would be fairly easy to keep clean. I installed her tray-perch on a work surface at the bend of the U, from where she could see both halves of the room and both windows. Since keeping the
door into the rest of the house closed would rob her of her usual vantage-point, I set up a perch for her at the highest point in the room, on top of a tall larder cupboard. This was high under the ceiling in the angle of two walls, much like her old door-top perch, with a good view to the largest window and the garden beyond. There were broad sills along both windows (complete with sacrificial potted plants), a double sink under the one facing the garden, and a large pine table that we could share. Nobody likes change, of course, but I was satisfied that all Mumble’s main requirements for daily comfort were covered.

Since my commute to and from London was longer now, the chances were that sometimes I would not make the last train home, so I considered the possibility of designing some sort of owl-feeder that would deliver pre-thawed rations for a couple of days at a time. The sketches in my notebooks owe more to Heath Robinson than to Leonardo, and, since I am no engineer, they seem to rely exclusively on melting ice as a timing system. (Measure time taken for ice-block of known dimensions to melt; place ice in plastic funnel of suitable calibre; place dead chick either directly on top of ice, or perhaps in small tray on pivoting arm counter-weighted at other end by ice-block?; when ice melts, chick will drop – either directly on to the feeding shelf, or, in one distinctly over-engineered version, on to an inclined plane that was apparently supposed to roll it somewhere else.)

Probably wisely, I went for a much simpler solution. I introduced Mumble to my new next-door neighbours on
either side, and showed them where to find my spare key, ready-thawed chicks, and a small, framed feeding-hole in the mesh of the aviary above her dining shelf. After what must have been an initial shock, both Richard and Steve kindly agreed that one or other of them would step in whenever emergency threatened. They were as good as their word, and they never let us down – not even on dirty nights when it must have been quite obvious from my telephone call that I was in some London bar. I don’t know what they thought of me, but in time they got quite fond of Mumble.

The diary records that it was 12 October 1981, six weeks after the move, before Mumble seemed to have got a handle on the new situation and showed signs of reverting to her old habits. For the first time since we had moved in, when I opened the night cage that morning she did not play the drama queen, but hopped on to the doorstep perch, gave an alto croon and put her face up for a good-morning nuzzle. Her appetite had stabilized, and she made no demand for breakfast. After spending some time on my shoulder while I made coffee, she flew up to her larder-top perch and settled down to rip the newspaper under it into tiny shreds, dropping them over the edge one by one and watching intently as they fluttered to the floor. We seemed to be back to normal.

* * *

It was only when we were living in Sussex that I was able to make routine observations of the annual rhythm of
Mumble’s life. This was possible because I had achieved for her a vague approximation of a Tawny Owl’s natural physical and mental environment – still very approximate, of course, but at least a good deal closer than had been possible in a flat high above city streets.

Over the course of the years that followed I noted both a definite sequence of seasonal mood swings that coloured her behaviour, and the progress of the biggest physical event in her annual calendar – the moulting season each summer. As I have already mentioned, it was only after our move to the country that her moults seem to have conformed to an unmistakable and predictable pattern. The notebooks in which I recorded the daily changes, and compared one year with the next, inevitably make tediously repetitive reading, so the rest of this chapter is a compilation of the entries that I made over several years. It starts with the beginning of Mumble’s year, a few weeks before a wild tawny would begin the process of reforging its bond with its mate and selecting a nest for that year’s brood.

For the past three months she has behaved much as she was doing in late September. The whole winter has been very mild, and she showed little sign of wanting to come in at night. I often left her out, and sometimes had to grab her when I did insist that she get into the basket.

She has started doing her midwinter ‘bat-walking’ act
across the mesh ceiling of the aviary. This involves flying up, doing a back-flip, grabbing the mesh with both feet, then walking ‘foot over foot’ right across the ceiling while hanging almost upside-down with her wings slowly fanning. I cannot begin to imagine what it’s all about, but there is definitely a rather aggressive swagger to the performance.

Today the weather is mild, dull and rainy. I didn’t get up until 9am (it’s the New Year bank holiday, and most of the adult population of the British Isles are nursing a giant collective hangover), and when I came down Mumble was warbling softly into a corner of her kitchen cage. She kept this up until I uncovered the cage, then she turned and hopped to a perch, with a couple of soft squeaks. She waited quietly until I opened up, then jumped at once to her doorstep. She put her face up for a nuzzle and kept soaking this treatment up for as long as I handed it out, rubbing and twisting her head against my face and gently pecking at my beard. She jumped to my shoulder when I patted it, and from there quietly to her tray-perch. After using it, she sat calmly watching while I made my breakfast until she got bored, and then flew up to the larder-top perch for a bit of light self-grooming.