The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar Read online

  In June 1976 southern England was sweltering under a once-in-twenty-years heat wave, and the hospital bed in which I was trapped, sweating freely and unable to move an inch, was immediately below a large skylight in the low ceiling of a single-storey side ward. Staked out under the burning sun like a victim of the Apaches, and unable to face the truly hideous hospital slops, I coped partly thanks to a kindly veteran night nurse with a relaxed attitude to injecting pethidine, and partly thanks to Dick, who faithfully visited me on his way home from work every evening, bringing delicious sandwiches. After a week, corseted in sweaty canvas and metal splints, I was able to lurch slowly out to his car, moving like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, and was carried back to Water Farm to convalesce.

  * * *

  Unavoidably, over the weeks that followed I spent many hours lying on a blanket in the shade with a book, or tottering slowly around while I recovered my mobility. I had more time to watch Dick’s birds than ever before, and my interest grew. Even I couldn’t spend entire days reading books without a break, and the birds became a welcome distraction. With the time simply to be still and observe them, and to revisit them for fairly long periods several times a day, I began to get a sense of the rhythm of their lives rather than just a series of snapshots. Watching them preening themselves brought the detailed structure of their bodies into closer focus, and I started to notice their individual characteristics. I began badgering my brother with questions about their quarters, food, daily routines, medical and emotional needs and other anticipated requirements, some of them no doubt extremely silly.

  These conversations continued intermittently by telephone long after I had returned home. If Dick had agreed with my often expressed doubts about the whole idea, I would probably have given up; but he isn’t the kind of person who assumes in advance that any dream, however daft, is unattainable. Before long I was running out of arguments against myself, and the evening came when I took a deep breath and asked Dick to telephone ‘this bloke he knew’. Perhaps with some vague idea that if keeping an owl proved to be a disaster, then a small owl would make it a small disaster, I asked him to find me a Little Owl (this is a species, not a description).

  And so it was that in the autumn of 1977 a 6-inch, 4-ounce bundle of feathered fury took up residence with me on the seventh floor of a large concrete apartment block beside the A23 in West Croydon. With his distinctly hawkish profile, beetling brows and blazing yellow eyes, his name could only be ‘Wellington’. Unfortunately, he also turned out to share the Iron Duke’s stubborn willpower.

  * * *

  The thrush-sized Little Owl – Athene noctua – is the smallest of Britain’s owls, and the most recently arrived. They were introduced during the second half of the nineteenth century from continental Europe, by landowners attracted by their reputation as scourges of mice and of insect pests; in several European countries they are actively encouraged by farmers, and protected by law. There is an appealing story that the first Englishman to exploit their usefulness was Admiral Nelson. When he was serving in the Mediterranean he is supposed to have acquired a hundred Little Owls from North Africa, and given them to each of his ships; they were kept on the officers’ tables at mealtimes, to clear the weevils out of their spoiled ship’s biscuit. (I have no idea if this tale is true, but I would love to believe it. I can just hear Nelson’s seadogs cheering their owls on, and laying wagers on how many prizes each would take.)

  The current British population is estimated – with the usual airy lack of precision found in all such figures – at anything between 5,000 and 12,000 breeding pairs. It has diminished over the past few decades, and the Little Owl is now on the conservationists’ amber list as a species causing moderate concern. They are the least nocturnal of our owls, and although they do hunt after dark they are also active during the daytime. Little Owls have barred and mottled dark brown and white plumage, and a rather more streamlined silhouette than larger species, with a flatter-looking top to their heads. They have the broad, rounded wings of a woodland bird, and a very short tail. In Europe they prefer to live in woods and copses among farmland, and as you drive through the English lowlands you may occasionally spot a hunched little figure sitting on a fencepost, checking out the open terrain of fields and hedgerows. At the right times of year they may even be seen following the plough to catch worms.

  The first of my many mistakes had been in asking for this breed of owl at all, and worse still was the fact that this particular owl was already six months old, and had spent those months in a large aviary with other birds. The most basic rule when seeking to tame any wild creature is that it should be isolated from its kind and raised by the handler from the earliest possible age – as soon as it can safely be separated from its mother. With careful kindness, the animal may be persuaded to project on to the handler any potential it has for social feelings. It is widely understood that a truly social animal, such as a dog, can easily be trained to regard its human owner as the alpha dog of the pack. A solitary hunting bird – a raptor, such as an owl – feels no such instinctive connection. The egg must be taken from the nest and hatched in an incubator, so that as soon as it emerges from the shell the hatchling sees, and is fed by, a human.

  It has sometimes been said that the bird will then ‘imprint’ on this person, forming an unbreakable bond and making it impossible to return it to the wild. That is to overstate the case by a wide margin. A fledgling raised for its first few weeks by one handler can easily transfer this familiarity to another human. Foundlings raised by humans have often been reintroduced to the wild successfully by a process of gradual disengagement. Alternatively, if carefully introduced to an aviary with other birds, then in time they become accustomed to the company of their own kind. However, if the bird spends the formative first weeks of its life outside the egg among other birds, and without being handled by a human, it is widely believed to be more or less untameable. This was the case with Wellington; had I known it, my attempts to ‘man’ him – to tame him to my touch – were probably doomed from the start.

  * * *

  Because Wellington was a nervous wild creature, unused to being handled, he had to be ‘jessed’ like a falcon before I took him home with me, or he would have been impossible to control.

  Jesses are narrow strips of thin, light leather that a falconer fastens round his bird’s ankles so that it can be held by them as it sits on his fist. The trailing ends are united with a little metal swivel-ring device (for falconry, a pair of tiny brass bells are also attached). When the falconer passes a leash through the swivel-ring – a yard or so of cord, with a stop-knot at the bird end – he can tether it to another swivel-ring on its perch or on a ‘weathering block’ in the open air. This leaves the bird with plenty of room to move around but no chance of tangling itself up in the leash (or that’s the theory, at least; in practice, some birds seem able to defeat this supposedly foolproof design with laughable ease).

  Fitting jesses to an untamed bird is obviously a job for two pairs of hands – in the case of Wellington, belonging to one expert and one apprehensive novice. He had to be taken out of his cage and held passive, lying on his back, with his legs in the air and his wings held gently but firmly to his sides – if he could get a wing free and start lashing about, we were in trouble. Some people favour holding birds swaddled in a soft cloth, while others are confident enough to take the correct hold with bare hands. As a nervous apprentice, I found it a disquieting job: until I had done it a few times I didn’t have an instinctive feel for how and where to grip. I was naturally terrified of holding too tightly – any constriction of a bird’s chest can be fatal – and I was taken aback to discover just how strong and wriggly such a little bird could be.

  If you get it right the bird just lies there, perfectly safe and comfortable, but a picture of outraged dignity. Personally, I always felt embarrassed and apologetic at this point, but this obscure sense of moral inferiority to the bird can disappear in a hurry if it manages to get a foo
t into you. Even the smallest raptors have extraordinarily powerful talons, and if they connect, they hurt. One of the tricks Dick taught me was that a bird that’s feeling spiteful can be given a pencil to hold: as soon as this touches its feet the wicked hooks snap closed around it, and hang on to it like grim death while you get on with fitting the jesses. (Since these inevitably get worn and tatty with badly aimed droppings, the remains of food and frequent absent-minded chewing, the chore of fitting your bird with nice clean socks has to be repeated at fairly regular intervals. However tame and lazy you think the bird has become, it can still give you a painful surprise if you relax your concentration during this procedure.)

  * * *

  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 o
verlooking 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.