The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ‘Perched on the back of a sunlit chair was something about 9 inches tall and shaped rather like a plump toy penguin with a nose-job. It appeared to be wearing a one-piece knitted jumpsuit of pale grey fluff with brown stitching, with a balaclava helmet attached. From the face-hole of the fuzzy balaclava, two big, shiny black eyes gazed up at me trustfully. “Kweep,” it said quietly.’

  When author Martin Windrow met the tawny owlet that he christened Mumble, it was love at first sight. Raising her from a fledgling, through adolescence and into her prime years, Windrow recorded every detail of their time living together (secretly) in a south London tower block, and later in a Sussex village. This is the touching, intriguing and eccentric story of their fifteen-year relationship, complete with photographs and illustrations of the beautiful Mumble. Along the way, we are given fascinating insights into the ornithology of owls – from their evolution and biology to their breeding habits and hunting tactics. The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar is a witty, quirky and utterly charming account of the companionship between one man and his owl.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  1 Man Meets Owl – Man Loses Owl – Man Meets His One True Owl

  2 Owls – the Science Bit, and the Folklore

  3 The Stowaway on the Seventh Floor

  4 The Private Life of the Tawny Owl

  5 Mumble in Her Pride

  6 The Driver’s Manual

  7 Mumble’s Day

  8 Mumble’s Year

  9 Real Trees and Free-Range Mice

  10 Departure

  Picture Section

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Martin Windrow

  Copyright

  The Owl Who Liked Sitting

  on Caesar

  Martin Windrow

  with illustrations by Christa Hook

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to Dick, Avril and Graham; to Tom Reeves, for his photographic help; to Jane Penrose, for her valuable advice; to Christa Hook, for her superb illustrations; and to my agent Ian Drury of Sheil Land Associates, for his confidence that I could find my way through these unfamiliar woods.

  Author’s Note

  Readers should be aware that in the UK all birds of prey, their eggs and their hatchlings are fully protected by law. If you chance upon what you think is a ‘lost’ owlet in the spring, do not be tempted to ‘rescue’ it and take it home with you. Only interfere if it is obviously in harm’s way – on the ground, within reach of dogs and other predators. In that case, pick it up by cupping it softly in your hands, lift it on to a safe branch, and leave it for its parents to find (they won’t be far away) – or for it to climb back to the nest by itself, which it will usually manage perfectly well. It is a myth to imagine that owls will abandon their young if they become ‘tainted with human scent’ by being touched. Traditionally, it has been believed that owls have almost no sense of smell; whether or not that’s true, if they find their strayed fledgling within about twenty-four hours the parents will continue to feed it.

  Only if the owlet is clearly injured should you even consider taking it home. In such cases it is important to contact some qualified person – a vet, a local RSPB or RSPCA officer, but preferably a specialist bird rescue centre – without delay. Keep it in a good-sized cardboard box, open at the top.

  If it is necessary to feed an owlet before somebody better qualified can take over its care, do not feed it bread and milk, which will kill it; owls are exclusively carnivores, whose digestion depends on making use of all parts of their animal prey. If you have to feed an owlet, then offer it scraps of raw minced beef (repeat, beef – not all meats are safe), perhaps dipped in egg yolk; use something like a blunt matchstick, and position the food well back in its mouth. A short-term solution to the important need for roughage is to mix in bits of soft feather (obviously, natural materials only – nothing that might have been dyed or otherwise chemically treated). But an owl’s dietary needs are more complicated than this; enlist the help of an expert in the care of raptors, and get real-time advice – quickly. The following address and websites may be helpful:

  The Hawk and Owl Trust, PO Box 400, Bishops Lydeard, Taunton TA4 3WH; Tel: 0844 984 2824; [email protected]

  www.animalrescuers.co.uk/html/owls.html

  www.barnowltrust.org.uk

  www.raptorfoundation.org.uk

  Introduction

  April 1981

  Shaving is tricky with an owl on your right shoulder.

  When I am working on the right side of my throat, Mumble tends to make darting, snake-like passes with her beak at the handle of the razor as it reaches the top of each stroke. Often, with a curiosity that disappointing experience never seems to dull, she takes opportunities, while I am working on the left side of my neck, to peck thoughtful gobs of shaving soap off the right side. The taste does not seem to appeal; after a few ruminative smacks of her mandibles she gives a little sneeze (snit!), and most of it ends up distributed around her whiskers. Still, she sometimes hops down to the edge of the basin and watches the floating clots of soap and bristles with interest. She feels delightful against my bare belly, warm and velvet-soft.

  I have tried persuading her to stroll across behind my neck to the left shoulder when operations on that side are complete, but she’s a right-shoulder owl by preference, and – like me – she does not welcome any kind of novelty at this hour of the day. We are both operating on autopilot, and this limited ability to cope with mornings is a bond between us.

  The shaving mirror reflects two pairs of eyes – one pair bloodshot blue, one glassy black – side by side in a rather sordid mess of wet hair, soap and feathers. I imagine that I can recognize in both pairs the familiar morning combination of apathy tinged with vague suspicion about what the day may bring: for me, sinister buff envelopes with cellophane windows; for her, perhaps, a troublesome frayed feather among the left wing secondaries. Who am I to add to her problems by trying to force her to cope with a radical new concept like helping me to shave from the left shoulder? We manage; in fact, we manage so well that usually I don’t even notice the bizarre adjustments into which I have gradually slipped during the three years since we first met.

  August 2013

  Mumble was so much a part of my life in those days that the oddity of our relationship seldom occurred to me, and I only thought about it when faced with other people’s astonishment. When new acquaintances learned that they were talking to a book editor who shared a seventh-floor flat in a South London tower block with a Tawny Owl, some tended to edge away, rather thoughtfully. Collectors of eccentrics were pleased – some of them to the extent that for years afterwards I was deluged at Christmas and birthdays with owl-related greeting cards. (This was mildly endearing at first, but got a little wearying in the longer term.) However, more conventionally minded people might question me – sometimes, I thought, rather relentlessly – about the practicalities of my domestic arrangements. I tried to answer patiently, but I found it hard to come up with a short reply to the direct question, ‘Yes, but … why?’; my best answer was simply, ‘Why not?’

  I am embarrassed to recall that on one occasion I tried an unattractively smart-arse routine: ‘Look – I’ve lived with her for two years. She costs me about twenty quid a year, all in. She’s wonderfully pretty, and amusing. She’s affectionate without being needy, and she smells great. She doesn’t mind how late I get home, she doesn’t talk at breakfast ti
me, and we hardly ever argue over who gets which bit of the Sunday paper.’ When I thought over what this rant might suggest about my attitude to human female company, I swiftly dropped it from my conversational repertoire.

  Almost invariably, when people actually met Mumble I didn’t have to say anything more to convince them. Whatever their preconceptions, when they were first confronted by a Tawny Owl at close range their faces would instantly light up and soften. During her first year or so, when it was still possible for her to meet strangers without glass or wire mesh between them, then – unless I remembered to caution them – their first wondering exclamation (usually along the lines of ‘Oh! … But it’s gorgeous!’) would often be accompanied by an instinctive reaching out to stroke her.

  Rather less welcome was my discovery that if I met that person again only after an interval of years, the first thing they tended to say was, ‘Oh yes, of course – the owl man!’ I have since consoled myself with the thought that there are far worse reasons for being (however slightly) memorable.

  * * *

  The strictures in the Author’s Note against giving way to a temptation to ‘rescue a lost owlet’ might seem hypocritical in a book about the pleasures of living with an owl, but my justification is that Mumble was not taken from the wild. She was hatched in captivity, reared by hand, and never knew a relationship with her own kind. I was able to give her a much longer, better-fed and less dangerous life than she would have known in the woods. At first I did feel an occasional twinge of guilt about denying her ‘the freedom of the skies’, but I soon found out that in the case of a Tawny Owl such feelings have everything to do with human sentimentality and nothing whatever to do with Nature – a tawny isn’t a skylark or a peregrine falcon, it’s a home-loving cat with wings. On the couple of occasions when she had the opportunity to do so, Mumble failed to show the slightest interest in exploring the freedom of the skies (and in the end, it may have been somebody in the grip of that sentimental delusion who caused her premature death).

  My feelings after that event were one of the reasons why, despite periodic nagging from my family, it has taken me many years finally to get round to digging out the notes and photographs that I took during the fifteen years that Mumble and I spent together, and to try to turn them into this book. Since I began to re-read the notebooks that I had laid aside in the mid-1990s, I have found myself reliving emotions that I had long locked away – and I am glad that I have.

  I should make one point about the text that has emerged from this process. I don’t pretend that all the ‘diary’ entries in this book are taken literally verbatim from notes made at the time, although I did work up many of those at some length when I first wrote them. I have naturally edited and elided some others; but all of them are faithful quotations from what I jotted down shortly after the events or thoughts that they record.

  * * *

  Why I decided, in my thirties, to acquire a pet for the first time – and an owl, at that, given my previous complete lack of interest in ornithology – remains a fair question. If the reasons ‘why’ were puzzling, then the ‘how’ was also less than straightforward.

  Mumble was not, in truth, my first owl; and although she became the epitome and icon of ‘owlness’ for me, it would be dishonest to airbrush out of the record my failed first relationship. Like most such mistakes, it taught me a lot.

  1

  Man Meets Owl – Man Loses Owl – Man Meets His One True Owl

  IT ALL BEGAN, as so many things have done over the past half-century, with my older brother Dick.

  By the mid-1970s he had achieved his long-held ambition to move out into the Kent countryside and acquire as old a property as he could, with enough space to indulge his several hobbies at weekends. (The list has included, over the years, competitive rally-driving, military vehicle restoration, aviation archaeology, rough shooting and falconry, besides guitar blues and various other pastimes involving extraordinarily exact and fiddly work for a man with large paws.) Since his wife Avril was both patient and highly competent in a wide range of practical skills (from fine needlework and working in silver through gardening and animal husbandry to concrete-mixing, structural repairs and decorating), Water Farm soon became a very attractive and interesting place to spend time, even though the farmhouse’s immediately previous occupants had been sheep. Moreover, there were very few commodities or services that you could discuss with Dick without seeing a thoughtful look steal over his friendly, slightly battered countenance: ‘Ah, now that’s interesting – as it happens, I know this bloke who …’ (can supply an army-surplus tank engine, cures sheepskins, works as a film stuntman, knows when his lordship’s warrens will be unguarded for the weekend, understands explosives, breeds wild boars, speaks Dutch, casts things in fibreglass, can get you whatever-it-is without the bother of boring paperwork, etc., etc.).

  At that time I was living in a high-rise flat in Croydon, South London, and commuting daily to a publisher’s office in Covent Garden, where I worked as the commissioning and art editor of a military history book list. In those days the extended family usually spent Christmases at Water Farm, and – since I both lived and worked surrounded by dirty concrete and diesel fumes – I would often exploit Dick and Avril’s endless hospitality to spend summer weekends in the Kent countryside. They kept a variety of animals over the years, off and on: multiple cats (including one who proved humiliatingly better than me at hunting rabbits), doves, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, a few sheep, a goat, a donkey, a Dexter–Angus-cross cow, my nephew Stephen’s splendid polecat-ferret Shreds, and for a time even a raccoon (fully grown, they’re a great deal bigger and stronger than you might think). I was not particularly an ‘animal person’, but this menagerie certainly added to the attractions of peace, space, clean air and Avril’s magnificent cooking.

  Before they even moved to Water Farm, Dick had become interested by books on falconry. Inevitably, he soon made friends in that world too, and acquired his first bird – a sleekly beautiful lanner falcon named Temudjin, after the young Genghis Khan. After buying the farm he built a mews and flights (living quarters for falcons, and aviaries large enough for them to move around in), and as his knowledge, circle of acquaintance and skills all increased these quarters came to be occupied by a succession of hunting birds. They included kestrels, buzzards, goshawks, and even a part-worn Steppe Eagle suffering from something called ‘bumble-foot’ (no, me neither).

  Watching Dick handle and train these lovely creatures, I found it impossible not to become intrigued myself. When I was finally allowed to pull on a glove and take one of them for a supervised stroll through the fields and lanes, the medieval spell brushed me at once. It’s a hard feeling to describe. There was vanity, of course: I refuse to believe the man lives who would not find himself striking a Plantagenet pose and unconcernedly stroking his falcon’s breast when a turn in the lane reveals a couple of gratifyingly impressed ramblers. But it was more than simply ego; it was a new kind of relationship for me, which put me in touch with a different set of feelings. I suspected that they went deep, and came from somewhere very old. It was a slow process, which I did not even admit to myself for some time, but gradually I began to realize that I wanted some sort of lasting contact with this new thing.

  The idea of keeping a falcon in a high-rise apartment block in South London was obviously ridiculous, but the daydream would not let me alone. It was my sister-in-law who unwittingly showed me the way in. Avril had wanted a bird of her own for some time, but one that could be fitted into the routine of the tirelessly active mother of two boys. Dick duly made a number of phone calls to gentlemen with odd nicknames, and in due course ‘Wol’ took up residence in Avril’s kitchen, spending most of his time on a perch in the shadows on top of a tall cupboard. Avril’s kitchen was a welcoming haven for casual passers-sby, and the addition of a Tawny Owl simply added to its attractions. (Wol sat so still that he was always assumed to be stuffed, until an eventual blink gave the game away; t
his had been known to cause a visitor to spill coffee or choke on a mouthful of cake.)

  I was charmed by Wol from the moment I laid eyes on him, and as it became plain how easily and unhysterically an owl – if taken young enough – can grow accustomed to human company, my resistance to the nagging idea of getting a bird for myself weakened.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1976 a friend and I begged spare beds at Water Farm while we attended a short parachuting course at a nearby airfield.

  This was long before novice sports parachutists had access to modern rigs with their relatively light packs, mattress-shaped canopies and sensitive controls that allow you to make a stand-up landing almost every time. Roger and I were taught how to make the landing-rolls that were necessary with the old Second World War-vintage Irvin ’chutes with the X-Type harness, which seemed to weigh as much as (and brought you to earth with all the catlike grace of) a sack of potatoes.

  My first jump was terrifying and exhilarating in equal measure. First came sheer, abject, bowel-loosening terror, as the engine of the little Cessna was switched off and I had to clamber out and balance between the wing strut and the landing gear, struggling to make out the jump-master’s reminders above the rushing of the wind. Then – when the canopy had slammed open, the tight harness was holding me like the hand of God, and Kent was smiling up between my feet – came a wave of sheer exhilaration, which redoubled when I struggled to my feet after a successful landing.

  However, it was the third jump that proved to be the most memorable experience. With the positively eerie lack of physical co-ordination that had been so noted by sports masters during my schooldays, when the final ‘green rush’ snatched me down I misjudged my roll spectacularly. I hit the ground backside-first, thus guaranteeing one of the classic (and excruciatingly painful) parachuting injuries – a compression fracture of the lumbar vertebrae. The luckless Roger, who had drawn the long straw and was still some hundreds of feet above the drop zone, had to prepare himself for his own landing while being distracted by my noisy writhings. My most lasting memory of the next half-hour is of a young pre-jump Army cadet among the circle of anxious figures staring down at me. He put a cigarette in his mouth, patted his smock pockets distractedly, muttered to his comrades – who shook their heads, unable to take their solemn eyes off me – and then leaned down to ask me if I had a light, mate. Temporarily preoccupied with thoughts about my spine, I was unable to oblige him.