The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (3 page)

* * *

I drove back to London that first Sunday night with Wellington on the passenger seat in a fairly large cage provided by Dick. Carrying it up from the underground garage into the block of flats, and up in the lift to my floor, took several nerve-racking minutes – one of my more rational misgivings about this whole project had been that all pets were actually forbidden in these flats. The caretaker was an uncompromising Yorkshireman who ran a tight ship, and one or two minor incidents in the past, when I had been sharing the flat with a journalist former workmate of mine, had led him to regard Flat 40 with a distinctly jaundiced eye. (In our defence, I must protest that Roy and I had seldom thrown parties – but when we did, we prided ourselves on giving our guests a good time.)

Luckily, on that evening the lift passed the caretaker’s floor without the stop-button lighting up. Once safely indoors, I put the cage on a table in the living room where Wellington was going to live until I built him something more spacious. I put some straw and newspaper inside for reasons of hygiene, and gave him a split log to sit on. The cage was a wide wooden box with a wire-mesh front, so he had a good field of view while still feeling the security of a roof and walls around him. This seemed sensible; in the wild,
Athene noctua
nests in tree holes, odd corners of
farm buildings, or even down abandoned rabbit burrows.

On the first few evenings when I got home from work I would be greeted by Wellington’s fierce yellow eyes blazing defiance from the shadows behind the wire mesh. After eating supper myself I would get some food out of the fridge for him, and settle down for the first sessions of trying to ‘man’ him. In the wild Wellington’s diet would have consisted largely of insects, though he would have relished anything from craneflies, earwigs, beetles, moths, worms, slugs and snails up to small rodents. Having been raised in captivity, however, he was accustomed to the usual rations for captive birds of prey: dead day-old chicks, which are handy little packages of nutrition still with egg yolk in their body cavities. Chicken hatcheries always have large supplies of these unwanted male chicks, and have learned that they can make a few pounds by refrigerating sacks of them for sale to falconers. Dick had given me a couple of dozen to keep Wellington going until I found a regular supplier of my own through the Yellow Pages.

* * *

There is seldom any secret to taming a wild animal, beyond common sense and kindness. You have to handle them gently and repeatedly until they lose their fear of you. You have to be endlessly calm and patient, because if you project fear or anger you can set the process back by days. This is, of course, especially true of a solitary animal as opposed to a pack animal: while a puppy has the mental mechanism to understand the concept of ‘correction’, and
will make a submissive response, a hunting bird interprets any sudden move as simple aggression.

You have to use their hunger to entice them to tolerate you; hunger is at first your only way of creating any kind of transaction between you. ‘Hunger’ means appetite – not starvation. Apart from being cruel, starvation is obviously counter-productive: you are trying to create a mood of calmness, and what starving creature is calm? Birds of prey consume a lot of ‘fuel’, so need regular feeding, and by learning to regulate the amount and timing of the daily meal it is usually possible to establish some kind of routine fairly quickly. (I should emphasize here that I am talking about taming a bird as a pet, not the much more complex process of training it to hunt free. True falconry involves very careful feeding and regular weighing, calculating the bird’s rations to keep it healthy but ‘sharp set’, so that it will be strong but still keen to hunt.)

* * *

All I was hoping to achieve with Wellington was a basic level of tameness. I wanted him to learn to come to me of his own free will, at first for food and later, perhaps, simply to a call or whistle. I wanted him to lose his street-fighter wariness, and allow himself to be played with and enjoyed. It seemed a reasonable target to set myself. After all, I had watched Dick make it seem ridiculously easy; he had once trained a kestrel indoors to come to his fist for food in less than a week, so I thought I knew roughly how to go about this game.

First spreading a newspaper on the floor by my chair and an old towel over the arm, to guard against accidents of a scatological nature, I would slip my left hand into an old driving glove (you don’t really need a glove for protection with a little bird like Wellington, but it gives them a better grip when they are standing on your fist). Then, with a bootlace leash between my teeth, I would ease the cage door open a few inches and grope hopefully inside, trying to get hold of Wellington’s dangling jesses and swivel, while he pranced and hissed his way around the most awkward corners of the cage. Finally getting a grip, I would gently pull him out until he abandoned resistance and jumped up on to my left fist. With my other hand I slipped the leash through the swivel ring and wound its hanging end loosely round my fingers, holding the swivel firmly between thumb and forefinger until I was settled in my chair and could give him a bit more rope.

The purpose of the exercise was to accustom him to my company to the point where he would take food from my fingers and eat it on the glove. I hoped that when we had achieved this I could let him fly loose around those parts of the flat where he couldn’t do much damage or injure himself, enticing him back to my fist with occasional treats. I would give a particular whistle whenever I showed him a snack – and only then – and in time I hoped that he would come to the whistle alone, bribe or no bribe. We would then be well on the way to the sort of relationship that I confidently expected.

The problem was that Wellington clearly hadn’t been
attending when I explained all this. Night after night, week after week, he would crouch (briefly) on my fist with all the relaxed confidence of a scrap-metal dealer confronted by auditors from Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs. For a bird of Wellington’s diminutive size I had to cut up the squidgy, yolk-filled chicks with scissors – a repulsive task. Suppressing my shudders, I would take a slimy gobbet from the saucer by my side and hold it out to him, whistling and crooning with what I hoped was seductive charm. Wellington would bob and weave, deliberately avoiding it, and keeping his beak welded firmly shut, like a toddler watching the approach of a spoonful of creamed spinach. I would dangle the disgusting treat before his furious eyes; I would rub it on his beak; after an hour or so I could barely suppress the urge to prise his stubborn mandibles apart and shove it in with the end of a pencil. All was to no avail; unlike his glorious and convivial namesake, Wellington dined alone in his quarters, or not at all.

* * *

The borrowed box-cage was obviously only a temporary expedient. So that Wellington did not have to be confined whenever I was not holding him on his leash, I first built him a ‘cadge’. This was simply a portable table-top perch, mounted in a tray wide enough to catch natural fall-out and to allow short strolls on his leash. A seed box, a bit of log fitted with a small swivelling ringbolt for the leash, and last week’s
Sunday Telegraph
were soon assembled and set up on top of the box-cage. Tethered there during his first
weekend in the flat, he could watch further developments.

My plans for Wellington’s permanent quarters were dictated by the layout of my flat. From the windowless, L-shaped hallway the first pair of rooms – the bathroom, and the bedroom that I used for my office – led off to left and right, the latter with a window overlooking a small balcony. Beyond these doors the hallway led on to my own bedroom straight ahead, with the kitchen to the left and the large living room to the right. This latter had been the main reason that Roy and I had chosen the flat; it was big, light and airy, with an almost complete wall of floor-to-ceiling windows along the south side. This overlooked an open vista of tall buildings against a big sky – a sort of mini-Manhattan view, equally impressive in bright sunlight or spangled with lights after nightfall. The room caught the sun all day long; at the far end another wide window faced westwards over low roofscapes, towards the rising green swell of the old Croydon airfield a couple of miles away. (If the flat had existed in August 1940, it would have afforded a striking view of Hawker Hurricanes scrambling through the smoke from blazing factories to intercept German fighter-bombers.) To the right of this end window, a glass door led sideways out on to the balcony outside the office window. This was really only a glorified concrete shelf, darkly roofed in by the balcony of the flat above, but it was big enough for a couple of deckchairs and a case of beer on sunny afternoons.

What I wanted to construct was a cage that would fit on the balcony, about the size of a large wardrobe, big
enough to allow Wellington to fly up and down for a few wingbeats. He could doze there in the fresh air while I was out at work during the day and it would give him a more interesting view by night, all the while keeping him sheltered from heavy weather by the overhang of the balcony above. This would put him within a couple of feet of the bedroom window of the flat next door, but luckily my neighbour Lynne was a good friend, who had no more love for the caretaker than I did. I assured her that owls of the species
Athene noctua
are not known for their loud singing at night. This claim was more hopeful than confident, but it turned out to be true. Since Wellington was so far from – and so far above – his natural farmland habitat, he had no real reason to issue his yelping territorial challenges, and there were no others within earshot to answer him.

* * *

I covered sheets of graph paper with scribbles before a satisfactory blueprint emerged. Since the balcony was small, and the door led out to it end-on, the planned creation could not be more than 2 feet wide if it was to leave space for me to squeeze out there past the nearside end of it, but there was room for it to be 6 feet long by 6 feet high. I planned a complete plywood section at the far end, about the size of a telephone kiosk, incorporating a hutch into which Wellington could retreat when he was feeling unsociable (which seemed to be his default setting), with a perch just outside his ‘doorstep’ and a shelf for him to eat on. The rest of the structure was to be of wire mesh
on a timber frame, with a couple more perches, made from branches, slanting across the corners at different heights.

I am emphatically not a handyman, but I thought that the door I devised was a stroke of genius almost worthy of an approach to the Patent Office. The Windrow Mark 1 Double-Reciprocating Owl Valve was made of mesh on wooden frames matching the inner dimensions of the cage, and was mounted towards the nearer end of its long ‘front’ side. It was in fact a two-layer door with the layers set back to back and hinged together, one layer opening inwards and one outwards. All I had to do was make sure that Wellington was down at the far end of the cage before pulling a wire to close the inner layer of the door across its width, shutting him down there. I could then pull open the outer layer, enter, and close it behind me, thus shutting myself inside an ‘owl lock’. There was just enough room in there for me to swing the inner door back past me again, leaving me and Wellington in the same space, without his ever having had less than one door between him and the open air. I would then get him into a basket, and reverse the process to carry him indoors with me.

Flushed with triumph, I set out on the Saturday morning to the local do-it-yourself store. This had everything that I needed, but there were one or two aspects that I had not thought through – principally, the difficulty of manoeuvring eight 6-foot lengths of 1-inch by 2-inch timber, three enormous sheets of marine-quality plywood (nothing but the best for Wellington), and sundry rolls of wire mesh through a narrow checkout exit, all balanced on
a flimsy supermarket trolley. Act Two of this comedy of cruelty took place in the car park, where I faced getting it all into or secured on top of my car. (‘Mummy, why does the funny red-faced man with the bleeding hands keep breaking bits of string and saying rude words?’)

At noon, calmed by cool beer and the lack of a human audience, I laid everything out on the living-room floor and set to work. My plan was to make each side, each end and the top separately, before juggling them out on to the balcony for final assembly. The scheme was sound enough, but the next thirty-six hours cruelly exposed my limitations as an entirely self-taught carpenter. Every measurement I had taken turned out to be that vital half-inch too short or too long. Every snipped end of wire mesh managed to stab my palm. Every staple bent uselessly as I tried to hammer it into the cheap, knotty wood. The hinge-screws split the timber, and at about 1am on the Sunday morning I discovered that I was missing three of the necessary angle-brackets.

By Sunday evening I was dumb and savage with fatigue, and coated with sweat and sawdust, while the living-room floor looked like a building site – but there, by God, it stood at last. It glowed a mellow gold under its coats of weatherproof varnish, its Double-Reciprocating Owl Valve worked as if pivoting on silk and graphite, and its floor was lagged with snowy newspaper – a veritable owl-palace. Wellington was duly installed, the picture of haughty ingratitude. Hardly had I poured another beer and sat down before the doorbell rang. It was Attila the Caretaker.

He and I had been distinctly wary of one another ever since my moving-in party many years before. All too conscious that Wellington blatantly breached a term of my lease, I summoned up my courage and prepared to make the opening address for the defence. After what I had been through that weekend I was insanely prepared to resist the oppressors to the High Court and beyond, but – to my astonished relief – there was no word of illicit livestock. It seemed that the trouble arose from another overlooked schedule or sub-clause of the lease, which forbade me to keep anything on the balcony that visibly lowered the tone of the apartment block. Since my balcony overlooked a gasworks, set among depressing terraced streets of two-up, two-down houses that were due to be demolished within the year, it was hard to imagine what I would have to do to genuinely spoil the aesthetics of the area. Nevertheless, the caretaker bluntly required me to move my ‘cupboard’, sharpish. In my relief that he had not investigated further, I promised to co-operate.