The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (4 page)

Early the next morning I slipped down for a street-level reconnaissance. After lurking around several corners at varying distances and angles from the block, I discovered that the top part of the cage was indeed visible, but only at ranges of 150 yards and more. It was almost entirely hidden by the balcony parapet and the cave-like shadow cast by the balcony above mine, and only the fine, glowing colour of the shelter at the end caught the eye. Sighing for my three coats of carefully brushed marine varnish, I mooched off to buy half a gallon of matt black paint. By lunchtime
a second recce had reassured me that Wellington’s quarters were now completely invisible from ground level. Since the regime did allow plantings on the balconies, I also invested in a fast-growing Russia vine and a bucket of compost. Within weeks this provided Wellington with a second layer of camouflage, and I would hear no more from the landlord’s
apparatchik
.

* * *

A couple of weeks later the problem of laying in rations for my owl became acute. I had found the number of a reasonably local hatchery and confirmed that they could sell me a sack of chicks, but I would have to turn up to collect them early in the morning before the pig-swill man arrived to take the lot. Since I was chasing deadlines at work too hard to take a morning off, that meant I could only fetch them on a Saturday. By the Tuesday I had only a couple of chicks left, and emergency measures were called for.

Presumably, I thought, Wellington could be tempted by some other sort of meat, so long as it was bloody, cut up small, and came complete with the fur or feather roughage that his digestive system demanded. What about raw rabbit – surely that was suitably rural? I remembered from my childhood that autumn was the time when one saw rows of shot rabbits hanging up outside butchers’ shops, with tin cups under their muzzles to catch any dripping blood. In London the place for all kinds of specialist food suppliers servicing the restaurant trade was Soho, and that was only a ten-minute stroll from my office in Covent Garden. That
lunchtime I walked over and began searching for an old-fashioned butcher selling game
au naturel
. The hunt was in vain; modern city taste apparently frowned upon such stark reminders of where meat actually comes from.

By the following day I was getting worried, and decided to look further afield. It was a long-established legend that Harrods department store in Knightsbridge could supply anything that the heart desired, and the Harrods food hall was famous. I took a long lunch break and rode the Tube westwards. When I entered the hushed, high-ceilinged temple to gastronomy and found my way to the butchers’ counters, sure enough, there was a row of rabbits hanging neatly against the marbled wall. They even had a well-mannered look, in keeping with their surroundings.

I had been so fixated on my target, and was so relieved to see it, that I had not actually thought out what I would say until I was approached by one of the staff. He was a silver-haired gentleman, impeccably dressed and aproned, with the quiet dignity of a bishop.

‘And how can I help sir today?’

‘I’d like a rabbit, please.’

‘Certainly, sir. Would sir be requiring a farmed or a wild rabbit?’

‘Umm … What’s the difference?’

(Very slightly pitying look:) ‘Generally, sir, it is believed that farmed rabbits are larger and more tender, but wild rabbits have more flavour.’

‘Er … A farmed one will be fine.’

‘Certainly, sir.’ The bishop turned and unhooked one of the furry corpses behind the counter. ‘And sir would like this skinned, no doubt?’

‘Oh, umm – no, no thanks – leave the skin on, would you?’

‘Of course, sir.’ He began to wrap the rabbit. But then I remembered, from occasional shooting forays from Water Farm, just what it took to actually dismember a rabbit from scratch – and I realized that I didn’t have any knives in my own lazy bachelor’s kitchen that would be strong enough for the job. This was going to be embarrassing.

‘Umm – I say – er, could you possibly chop it up for me? With the fur on, I mean? Into fairly small chunks?’

The bishop stood quite still, his glossily shaven features expressionless, and gave me a long look. Speaking rather slowly and deliberately, he asked:

‘So sir would like me to cut up this rabbit – on the bone – unskinned – into
chunks
…?’

‘Yes – yes, would you, please? … Umm – it’s not for me, you see.’ I was about to explain who it
was
for when my nerve failed me.

With his back to me, he proceeded to do as I asked. In long years of service to a demanding public, this, I imagine, may have been a first for him. As his cleaver rose and fell, one of his fellow prelates was busy at the marble cutting-top next to him. I saw their heads move together. A moment later the other butcher stole a quick, inscrutable glance at me over his shoulder. The minutes seemed very long before I could thrust a banknote over the
counter and make my self-conscious escape. It would be some months before I dared return.

* * *

I never did find out if Wellington actually ate much of his painfully acquired rabbit. He certainly wouldn’t touch his bunny-chunks during our next couple of frustrating evening sessions, so I had to leave bits of them in the balcony cage when I put him out for the night. He may have deigned to try them when he was alone, or he may have kicked them into a corner of his hutch with a hiss of contempt. That Saturday I bought several months’ worth of dead chicks, and had to empty my small freezer cabinet to pack them away. (And yes – on one occasion a guest seeking ice cubes for her gin and tonic did make a startling discovery.)

The weeks of autumn turned into winter, and almost every evening Wellington and I continued our battle of wills as I persevered in trying to tame him. The sign I had hoped for was the classic indication that a bird has decided you are nice to be near: fluffing up his feathers, standing on one leg and taking a nap on your fist. Avril’s Tawny Owl, Wol, spent most of his life in this pose. Even Dick’s falcons, who were a right bunch of knife-fighters, would only simper sleepily while he stroked their breast feathers. But at my gentlest touch Wellington went rigid, and launched himself into a manoeuvre known in the trade as ‘bating off’.

When a spooked bird takes it into its head to be upset about something, it will leap into the air to the full extent
of the jesses and leash, and then fall until it is hanging upside down from your hand, projecting a sulky refusal to play any constructive part in the proceedings. Wellington was in no pain or discomfort; he could perfectly well get back up by himself with a single beat of his wings – as he would rapidly demonstrate if he ever fell off a perch by accident. But no; there he hung, twisting gently by his ankles, wings half open, and obstinately refusing to see reason. When you are not used to this behaviour it naturally seems alarming – you are concerned that the bird may injure itself. When you have picked it up and sat it back on your fist twenty times in an hour, only to be rewarded with another
kamikaze
dive, you tend to get irritable. If you give up and put the dratted creature back on its perch, you lose ten points.

With effortless ease, Wellington invariably beat me at this game. He was not going to take food from my hand; he was not going to let me stroke him; he was not even going to sit on my fist for more than a moment at a time. As a creature designed by evolution for solitary hunting by means of untiring watchfulness, he had infinite resources of patience. I – being designed to catch my dinner by dashing around the savannah with my mates, in a state of noisy excitement – did not.

* * *

During that winter of 1977–78 I had to go away for a week-long business trip, and Dick kindly agreed to put Wellington up in a vacant aviary while I was away. When
I returned and rang to arrange a trip to collect him, Dick’s voice was apologetic. He told me that while I was away Wellington had found a chink in a corner of the mesh, and had escaped into the night.

My response to this news was distinctly mixed. I was sorry to have given Dick reason to worry; but at the same time, I was frankly relieved at being freed from a failing project without actually having had to make a decision. It would have been ridiculous to claim that I was fond of Wellington. He had been a prisoner and I his jailer; after about four months we had achieved no other relationship, nor was there any hint that we ever would. There was nothing for it but to write the whole thing down to experience, and get on with my life.

In the event, it didn’t turn out like that. As the weeks passed, the lack of focus to my evenings at home became faintly disagreeable. The empty cage on the balcony – in front of my eyes outside the office window whenever I sat down at the typewriter – was a frequent reproach. My original wish to own and tame a bird of prey had been dampened but not quenched, and I couldn’t help brooding about the gap between what I had wanted to achieve and what had actually happened. During the family Christmas holiday at Water Farm the benign and fluffy presence of Wol, calmly presiding over the festivities from his shaded perch high up in a corner of the kitchen, was a constant reminder. In the New Year, I admitted to myself that I still wanted an owl. But what sort of owl?

* * *

After Wellington, I didn’t want another
Athene noctua
, but there would be little problem in acquiring a Barn Owl –
Tyto alba
(of which there are many more in captivity these days than in the wild, some of them birds rescued after being injured). The Barn Owl is the glamour-puss of TV natural history programmes, which seem to queue up to film them inside nesting boxes. The Latin name means White Owl; in Britain it is sometimes also known as the Screech Owl, from the blood-chilling shriek that occasionally scares the pants off night-time dog-walkers in the countryside. (In America this is the name of a different species.) Obviously, it takes its everyday name from its habit of nesting in farm buildings and setting up a mutually beneficial hunting territory in farmers’ yards and fields.

The Barn Owl’s stiffly heart-shaped face gives it a haughty look of self-conscious dignity, and its magnificent golden-buff and white plumage dusted with dark speckles makes it highly visible (sometimes startlingly so, given its silent, ghostly approach) as it quarters its territory during hunting patrols both by night and in daylight. These photo genic looks, coupled with its precarious population numbers, make it the poster-owl for conservationists, and its flexible daily timetable and willingness to live close to humans are convenient for wildlife photographers and film-makers. But beautiful and graceful though the Barn Owl undoubtedly is, I must confess that I have never really warmed to it emotionally, and, while it thrives in aviaries,
the books told me that it seldom makes a satisfactory house-pet.

The Tawny Owl –
Strix aluco
– studiously avoids people with film cameras and PhDs, and lives a much more private life than
Tyto alba
. It does not patrol on the wing, is much less tolerant of humans nearby, and spends most of its time sitting motionless and camouflaged in woodland trees. Logically, it should therefore seem a more remote and less sympathetic creature, but human sentimentality doesn’t work that way. When confronted with a tawny, it would surely take a heart of stone not to feel the urge to cuddle it. It is well known that humans instinctively respond most warmly to animals (especially young ones) with soft fur or feathers, and faces in the place that we expect to see them. This ‘
aaah
… factor’ is, of course, just sentimental anthropomorphism, but its force is so undeniable that it seems pointless to fight it.

We identify with owls because they have an upright stance and a recognizable face. Tawnies also have a rounder head than Barn Owls, and a rounder facial disc that is more softly delineated and less aristocratic. Their dark eyes are relatively larger, and, unlike those of Barn Owls, are not widely separated by a smooth, vertical ridge of protruding feathers. Instead, a widow’s peak of short, contrast-coloured feathers growing down from the ‘forehead’ seems to cut the upper edge of the facial disc into two ‘eyebrows’. We automatically perceive the short, hooked bill as a ‘nose’, and the corners of the mouth are hidden by a broad triangle of ‘whiskers’.

Watch a tawny for any length of time, and the subtle movements of the tiny, dense feathers covering its face give it what we perceive as a more expressive appearance than the rigid, heart-shaped mask of the Barn Owl. These changes do not, of course, have any real correlation to human facial expressions of emotion, but they look as if they should do – in the same way that a panting dog can look as if it is grinning. In repose, hunkered down and fluffed up into the shape of a cottage loaf, tawnies have a contentedly sleepy, comfortable look, and their brown and off-white plumage gives an illusion of being softer than that of the sleeker-looking Barn Owl. And finally, the tawny has the reputation of making a happy pet.

After the briefest mental flirtation with thoughts of a majestic (and, more to the point, usually silent)
Tyto alba
, my choice was easy; I wanted a tawny myself.

* * *

In Britain all wild raptors and their eggs and nestlings are strictly protected by law. I discussed my plans with Dick, and phone calls were made to knowledgeable people with – in this case – the correct legal paperwork. In due course word came back, with a price for reserving the first egg laid in the coming spring by a hen tawny in the aviaries of a licensed breeder of birds of prey. I took the plunge, and placed my order.

This choice of egg was apparently important. In captivity – where conditions replicate years of abundant prey in the wild – most tawnies lay their eggs in clutches of
up to five. Just as in the wild, these are laid in a staggered sequence at intervals of at least two and sometimes several days. The owlet that emerges from the first egg to hatch, about four weeks later, has an immediate advantage over its fellow nestlings. For at least a couple of days and often longer, it enjoys the parents’ exclusive attention and feeding. By the time its siblings hatch it is bigger, stronger and more loudly insistent in calling for food, and so has a better chance of thriving.