The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (6 page)

The different families, genera and species of owls all share a strong, compact body generously feathered with dense, soft plumage that hides a long, flexible neck, powerful legs and big hooked talons. They also share a habit of immobility; they spend most of their time sitting quietly and watching the world go by, so they have no need for any vivid coloration – camouflage is more important to them than advertising their identity from a distance or putting on scary deterrent displays (though they can do that too, when they need to). Because of their unobtrusive colouring and nocturnal way of life, many species – especially those that favour thick woodland rather than open country – depend on sound for communication. They are much more vocal than most daytime raptors, and they have a wide vocabulary of specific calls.

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About 135 species of owls, grouped in twenty-four genera, have been classified the world over. (‘About’, because new
species are still occasionally discovered in remote jungle regions, and also because taxonomists disagree over whether or not some sub-species should properly be classified as truly separate.) The great majority belong to the family
Strigidae
, but about ten species are classified as
Tytonidae
– the Barn and Grass owls, which share some distinct anatomical differences from the rest. Ornithologists have made quite deep studies of a limited number of the world’s owl species, but their habitats and nocturnal behaviour make them difficult subjects for field observation, so, beyond their mere existence and some basic characteristics, many species are still very little known. One thing is certain: owls have adapted successfully to all but one of the almost limitless range of environments with which they have been confronted by the millennial cycles of climate change and species proliferation.

In size, they range from the several species of Eagle Owls – which come up to your hip when you stand beside one that’s sitting on a low ground perch – down to Elf and Pygmy owls that are the size of small garden songbirds. The very biggest is said to be Blakiston’s Fish Owl, some of which reach 30 inches (75cm) tall and weigh 10 pounds (4.5kg), with a wingspan of 6.75 feet (2.05m). The smallest, the Elf Owl of the south-west USA, is about 5 inches (13cm) tall, and weighs around 1.5oz (42.5g) – one-hundredth the weight of an Eagle Owl.

Owls are found on every continental land mass except Antarctica, and on many remote islands. Most of them live in or on the edges of forest, in regions as diverse as the
frozen Arctic taiga and tropical rainforest or swampland. However, some species also thrive in treeless terrain: owls can be found living on open prairies, in arid deserts and on the Arctic tundra. Most species nest in trees or on rocky ledges, but others on the ground, or even in underground burrows. Many species remain on their home turf all year round, but some will disperse more widely when local prey becomes scarce, and others regularly make seasonal migrations over land and sea. As a rule of thumb, the more varied an owl’s appetite, the more likely it is to stay in one place and to form a long-term bond with a mate; the more specialized its diet, the more likely it is to wander in pursuit of that prey – like nomadic human hunters following the herds – and to form only relatively brief relationships in the breeding season.

Only perhaps 40 per cent of owl species are strictly ‘nocturnal’ (that is, they hunt only between nightfall and dawn), while many others are active both in the light evenings and by night. A number of species – and not only those that have adapted to the ‘white nights’ of high summer in the Far North – hunt in full daylight. Many owls hunt by the ‘perch-and-pounce’ method: they watch patiently from look-out points until they spot a potential meal below, then dive down to make their kill. However, some species (especially among those that are active in the daytime and dusk) hunt on the wing like hawks and falcons, and others may run around chasing prey on the ground.

Their diets range all the way from insects (including
the whole menu of what we might simply call ‘creepy-crawlies’) through invertebrates like worms and slugs to snakes, crustaceans, frogs and other amphibians, up to rodents small and large, rabbits and hares, cats, dogs, foxes and occasionally even young deer. Many routinely prey on other birds, ranging in size from sparrows up to herons; in coastal areas the largest owls have been known to tackle even such dangerous fellow predators as the Great Skua, and in northern forests large owls regularly hunt smaller owls. Some African and Asian owls specialize in fishing, and in the rivers of Siberia and northern China it is common for Blakiston’s Fish Owl to snatch prey as large as salmon and pike.

The relative numbers of the different types of prey taken by any particular species of owl vary with the regular cycles of availability of each edible creature in their hunting territories. These cycles, which recur over a few consecutive years, also govern the breeding numbers of owls, and thus their own population density.

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Five species of owls are normally resident in mainland Britain: in descending order of population numbers, the Tawny, the Little, the Barn, and the Short-Eared and Long-Eared owls. Additionally, the great white Snowy Owl has been known to breed during summers spent in the Shetland Isles, but is otherwise only a winter visitor to Scotland from its sub-Arctic home ranges in Scandinavia. There are marked differences – in habitat, timetable of daily activity, and to a
lesser extent in preferred prey – between the ecological niches occupied by the different species, and this allows them to co-exist without too much direct competition.

The Little and Barn owls have already been described briefly. The scarce and closely related Short-Eared and Long-Eared owls are not found in southern or eastern Britain, but mostly in the north and west. (Their ‘ears’ are in fact simply tufts of feathers on their heads that are used for recognition and signalling, and have nothing whatever to do with their actual ears.) The populations of both species are notoriously uncertain, but there may be about 3,500 breeding pairs of Short-Eared Owls in Britain (so slightly less than the Barn Owl population), and fewer than 1,000 pairs of Long-Eared. Both are migratory species, and in autumn and winter Scandinavian visitors increase the numbers of Short-Eared Owls. Birds that migrate seasonally are less solitary in their habits than those that stay close to home. Both these species are less territorial and – except in the breeding season – more gregarious than the solitary Tawny, Little and Barn owls. Small squadrons of Long-Eared Owls have been seen migrating from Scotland southwards and westwards in autumn, and groups of them will roost together in wintertime. So long as prey is plentiful, different pairs of Short-Eared Owls will tolerate each other when living quite small distances apart.

These two species are roughly similar in size and colouring, but very different in their habitats and ways of life. The Short-Eared are birds of open heath, grassland and marsh, which nest and spend much of their time on or
close to the ground. With relatively long wings and lemon-yellow eyes, they hunt on the wing by day and at dusk. Long-Eared Owls are strictly nocturnal woodland birds, found particularly in conifer forests; they have relatively short, broad wings and orange eyes, and hunt on the wing along the edges of their home forest. Always sparse in numbers, but formerly found distributed over wide areas, in the twentieth century Long-Eared Owls suffered a marked decline in Britain. Simultaneously, an owl of similar size and colouring but much more adaptable habits began to extend its range into their territories:
Strix aluco
, the Tawny or Brown Owl.

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So much for the palaeontology and zoology; but what about the ‘sociology’ – historically speaking, how do we feel about owls?

Ancient cave paintings in France and other surviving images from around the world confirm that mankind’s conscious relationship with owls stretches back over tens of thousands of years, and they figure more often than any other bird in human myth and folklore. Puzzlingly, our feelings towards them have always been remarkably ambivalent: humans have felt respect for owls’ actual or imagined qualities, while simultaneously regarding them with superstitious dread.

The practical aspects of mankind’s interaction with owls have mostly been positive. Throughout most of our history we have not seen owls as competitors for food
resources – indeed, we have recognized that they are actively helpful to us. Since the birth of agriculture some 10,000 years ago farming has overwhelmingly meant the cultivation of grain crops, and rodents have always been the scourge of the grain farmer – they plunder his harvest, foul his stored grain and spread disease. Being more versatile than cats, owls are Nature’s greatest killers of rodents, so having owls around the place was an unambiguous benefit for farmers. In parts of northern Europe you can still see both field perches deliberately provided for them, and traditional farmhouses built with pierced ‘owl-boards’ in the gables to encourage nesting Barn Owls, and in several of those countries folk wisdom has been reinforced by legal protection. (Historically, captive owls were also used by bird-catchers to lure ‘mobbing’ birds into nets, or on to nearby twigs smeared with gluey bird-lime.)

Nevertheless, superstition has influenced human attitudes towards owls much more powerfully than any commonsense recognition of their usefulness. On the positive side, in Western and some other cultures owls have been associated with wisdom (though interestingly, they have the opposite reputation in Indian folklore). Europeans have always been impressed by the owl’s serene stillness during daytime: our forebears assumed that anything that spends so much time sitting quietly and keeping itself to itself must be deep in thought – thus, the ‘wise old owl’, who watches everything but says nothing. The ancient Greeks associated the Little Owl, which is common in Mediterranean countries, with their warrior
goddess of wisdom, Pallas Athene. Depictions and literary allusions to the goddess often included owl imagery, and since she was the tutelary deity of the city-state of Athens her Little Owl even appeared on some Athenian coins. Among more distant cultures from our own there were a few others that positively revered the owl, such as the Mongolians and Tatars. Some Native Americans believed that the souls of their medicine men passed into owls, and in southern Australia the aboriginal peoples regarded them as, specifically, the guardian spirits of women.

Since literacy and learning in medieval Europe were almost exclusively the province of the Church – and since owls often nested in church towers – owls became popularly associated with the clergy. A twelfth-century English allegory by one John of Guildford,
The Owl and the Nightingale
, mentions both Barn and Tawny owls – respectively, ‘the owl that scritchest’ and ‘the owl that yollest’. (When the author of the illustrated
Ashmole Bestiary
of the early thirteenth century comments on what is clearly a Barn Owl that it is ‘heavy with feathers, signifying superfluity of flesh and lightness of mind’, he is simply showing his ignorance; an owl’s flesh is anything but superfluous.) In the Arthurian myth cycle the wizard Merlin was supposedly accompanied by an owl sitting on his shoulder. The owl’s sedentary stillness, cloaked posture and big eyes surrounded by encircling feathers would later remind people of a bespectacled scholar or schoolmaster – respected for his learning, if mocked for his stuffy dignity and unworldliness.

In all superstitious societies, owls’ body parts have figured in the rituals and recipes devised to summon up ‘sympathetic magic’, and such beliefs ranged from the straightforward to the fanciful. It is easy to understand why Apache warriors in the American South-West decorated their war-caps with owl feathers, invoking the skills of silent, stealthy hunting. A rather more plonkingly literal approach persuaded several other peoples to eat owls’ eyes in the hope of improving their night vision. In Yorkshire, owl soup was supposed to cure whooping cough, and even in early modern times there was an English country superstition that feeding a child the egg of this ‘sober’ bird would protect it from growing up to become a drunkard. (Again, Indian folklore went its own way: in India, owl flesh was imagined to be an aphrodisiac.)

* * *

The place occupied by owls in our folklore has reflected a confusion between respect and fear, but heavily skewed towards the latter. Unfortunately, the negative images of owls have always far outweighed the positive, and this is obviously due to their association with the night. Night-time for humans meant blindness and helplessness in the face of real or imagined terrors. Night was when ghosts and evil spirits walked abroad, and a creature that was specifically a master of the night must therefore be a consort of the dark powers.

Only a few centuries ago in Europe owls were one of the animals habitually supposed to be the devilish
familiars of witches; for instance, the
Book of the Days
reporting the trial of the three ‘Belvoir witches’ in Leicestershire in 1618 has a woodcut including one of them, Joane Willimot, with an eared owl on her shoulder. This reputation as a witch’s accomplice was not simply a case of the owl providing an unwitting conduit for evil. It was argued that any bird that hid from the sunlight and was habitually ‘abused’ – that is, mobbed – by daytime birds must bear the curse of some ancient crime. The Old Testament lists the owl among the creatures to be abominated, and as the inhabitant of ruins it was also a dreary reminder of the vanity and decay of human hopes: ‘It shall never be inhabited … but wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there … And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof; and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls’ (Isaiah 13:20–21; 34:13).

By extension from its occult associations and its dark and eerie haunts, the owl became – above all others – the creature of ill omen, and the herald of misfortune and death. Oddly enough, while the Romans were great respecters of Greek culture, and identified Pallas Athene with their goddess Minerva, their feelings about her symbolic bird were overwhelmingly negative (although, by contradiction, images of owls were supposed to counter the evil eye). Pliny the Elder’s
Natural Histories
are a hilarious repository of utter nonsense about animals and the remedies to be derived from their body parts; his ignorance
is exemplified by his belief that owls had defective vision, and his credulity about their malign supernatural power seems to have been widely shared. In his society, whose priests interpreted the behaviour of birds when studying the auspices before public decisions were made, ‘owl’ was already a slang term for a witch. An archaic translation of Pliny declares that ‘The scritch-owle betokeneth always some heavy news, and is most execrable and accursed in the presaging of public affairs.’ To Pliny, the owl was ‘the very monster of the night’, and the sight of one ‘foretells some fearful misfortune’ (though history does not record whether he heard one before his fatal boat trip to examine the eruption of Vesuvius in
AD
79).