The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (16 page)

In the autumn of 1979, when she was about eighteen months old, I noted an unwelcome change in Mumble’s habits. Sometimes, instead of (or after) sitting on my shoulder, she would take up position on top of my head. I suppose that the attraction was extra height and superior all-round visibility, which was fair enough; but it involved the frequent shuffling around of sharp claws to adjust her balance, and the subsequent take-off kicks could be quite painful.

Specific occasions when she chose to do this included any time when I used the telephone in the hallway. This seemed to provoke in her a positively childish competition for my attention. She might be sitting at a window gazing serenely over the roofscape, or dozing contentedly on top of a door; but if the phone rang, or I dialled out, then within a moment she would arrive on my scalp. She would squeak peevishly, pecking downwards at the handset or my ear, and then jump to the crook of my arm and try to bite through the dangling spiral cable. Callers who were ignorant of my domestic arrangements sometimes found the resulting three-way conversation confusing. I hesitated to share with them the fact that I was conducting it with
an owl sitting on my head, for fear that the more conventionally minded clients might think such behaviour unprofessional.

* * *

I had always left Mumble a shallow water dish in her balcony cage, knowing from Avril’s experience with Wol that owls enjoy the occasional bath. She seemed to do this at least once a week, though it was hard to be sure. The first time I saw her doing it she reminded me of a human getting into a bath of uncertain heat. She stood for a few seconds on the rim of her dish, then stepped down into it with dainty caution, one foot at a time. She thought about things for a moment, standing with the water halfway up her lower legs; then she slowly settled downwards and forwards into it, until she was lying on her front with the water now halfway up her sides. She fluffed her feathers out a bit, wriggled and did a few gentle push-ups, waggling her tightly folded wings slightly. She kept these furled up, but then began clapping them against her sides more vigorously while ducking her face down into the water and up again, splashing droplets up and over her back. After several of these wing-waggling sessions she lay still for a while, obviously enjoying her soaking. Then she clambered to her feet and stepped carefully out, to begin the lengthy process of shaking herself dry and grooming her feathers.

This interest in water extended to times when she was free in the flat. When I was washing dishes in the kitchen sink she would sometimes fly to my shoulder, looking down
with apparent fascination at my hands splashing among the suds and plates in the washing-up bowl. She was clearly trying to decide whether or not to jump down there and join in the action, but she never quite nerved herself to do it. However, on one really adventurous bath night it became apparent that she had been keeping her eyes open until I left water in the otherwise empty bowl.

I was relaxing in the living room that evening, not thinking about what she was getting up to, when I heard a
flopp!
like a soaking-wet dishrag falling on the lino floor of the kitchen. As I looked across to the kitchen door, something appalling came waddling slowly into view. Mumble had clearly been right under the water, and for some time, because her head was as completely soaked as the rest of her body. A longer beak than I had ever seen, and a pair of madly staring eyeballs, were sticking far out to the front of a tiny head covered with a thin Goth hairstyle of long black spikes (‘
Baby!
I hardly
recognized
you!’). Her body was a dark, bedraggled mass of ratty tails, like those handfuls of soiled sheep’s wool that you find caught on barbed-wire fences in wintertime, and her wings looked like a wrecked umbrella in a storm drain.

Muttering and complaining under her breath, she came hopping and clicking towards me across the floor, making completely pointless wing-flaps every few steps. She was so heavy that she could not even jump up to my wrist. She had to find a ladder of graduated footholds so that she could climb – from floor to footstool, from there to my knee, and then laboriously up my chest to my shoulder, still
grumbling continuously. Once there, she tried to shake half a pint of water out of her wings, but her balance was so bad that she nearly fell off again, and she made me jump by locking her talons painfully in my shoulder.

I got carefully to my feet, and she clung on while I walked her slowly back into the kitchen. The ceiling strip-light was only a foot or so from the top of a stack of free-standing shelves. She climbed slowly and unsteadily up the inclined bridge of my arm until she could reach the top shelf. Again she tried to shake, but the flopping weight threatened to carry her over the edge. So there she stayed, as close to the warmth of the light as she could get, drying out by slow degrees for the rest of the evening.

This was obviously going to take hours, so I left her to it. From my chair in the living room I couldn’t see her, but a score of times I heard the rattle as she shook her sodden feathers in furious, ten-second bursts. If I craned backwards I could see her shadow on the kitchen wall, huge and nightmarish, as she turned herself inside out and upside down in a frenzy of flapping and grooming. When I went out after a couple of hours to see how she was getting on, she was leaning slightly forwards into the light with her thin racks of separated black flight feathers half open; she was an evil sight, and she seemed to know it. Her chances of achieving flight were about the same as one of those Edwardian cartoon ‘intrepid birdmen’ with strapped-on wings, about to fling himself off a clifftop with deranged confidence. (‘It’ll never work, Mumble – stay by the sunlamp.’)

That night I served the chicks in her open cage and left
the kitchen light on, so that she could make up her own mind where she wanted to spend the hours until sunrise. She looked in pretty good shape by the next morning; the experience didn’t put her off occasional light bathing in the washing-up bowl, but she never again tried swimming under water.

* * *

Another habit that came as something of a surprise to me was her enjoyment of sunbathing. I was vaguely aware, of course, that on sunny days most birds occasionally like to get belly-down on the ground in a patch of dust and flap their feathers about. The dust helps clear out parasites, and the sunlight is a necessary source of vitamin D. But for some reason I had never connected this practice with night birds like Mumble, even though I had quickly learned that she was quite happy in the sunshine.

One summer weekend I was reading in the living room with the balcony door open when I heard a loud
splat!
from the cage – the sound of Mumble jumping down to the newspaper carpet. After a few moments I got up and took a peek around the corner on to the balcony, to satisfy a vague curiosity about what she was up to. For a microsecond my heart lurched: Mumble was lying flat on her belly on the floor. But almost immediately I sensed, from the relaxed nature of the slight movements that she was making, that she had taken up this pose deliberately. She was lying flat on her front in the largest patch of sunlight that she could find, with her wings spread wide, her neck
bent back, and her face pointing directly upwards into the sunshine with closed eyes.

Before I turned quietly away and left her to enjoy it, I noticed that – oddly – the sunbathing session seemed to involve much the same sort of facial transformation as when she snapped on to the alert when spotting a pigeon taking liberties outside the window. Why this should be, when the one activity was presumably a sensual pleasure and the other a prelude to combat, seemed baffling, but there was no mistaking the resemblance. The skin of her head looked tight, and the close packing of the feathers gave her a ‘pinhead’ look. The furry wedge of feathers between her slitted eyes protruded and spread wider sideways, covering the inner top part of the eyes so that they appeared tilted and further apart. This ‘squared off’ or ‘Oriental’ expression was absolutely distinct from her usual appearance in repose.

* * *

For the first time, in November 1980 – so when she was about two and a half years old, and at completely the wrong time of year – I noticed broody behaviour that finally convinced me that Mumble must indeed be a hen bird. I found her sitting in the semi-darkness on the hallway table on a large, dish-shaped ashtray. During our first months together I had often found her lying flat on her front for a rest, but this was quite different. She had arranged herself exactly like a chicken sitting on its eggs – lying on her front, head back and tail cocked up, with her
body feathers puffed out sideways and her wings folded protectively around the ‘nest’. She seemed dozy, and made sleepy cheeping noises when I stroked her. Very occasionally over the hours that followed she would stand up, shuffle sideways around the rim of the ashtray while pecking vaguely at it, and then fluff herself up and settle down on it once again with a shake of her skirts. She continued this, off and on, for about eight days. (Although I kept an eye out for this behaviour the following spring, and in the years thereafter, I very seldom saw her repeat it, and never for days at a time like this first occasion.)

* * *

Since getting back from the Christmas holiday at Dick’s, and remembering both Mumble’s broody behaviour last month and her previous response to other owls, I’ve been thinking about what she has missed through being born into captivity. There is obviously something about caging a bird that we instinctively see as wrong, because the very idea of flight represents freedom to us, so I had better keep myself honest by thinking this through every now and then.

Birds evolved to fly because flying offered them an advantage in the great competition of life. The price for this is that flying demands a considerable investment both in the energy to power strong muscles fuelled by a fast-beating heart, and in the self-maintenance of a complex,
sometimes fragile body. Science teaches us that some originally flighted species of birds have subsequently become flightless, because their environment changed in ways that removed the need for this specialized behaviour. Such species ‘chose’ to give up flying when it ceased to deliver real advantages, and so they gradually lost the physical ability. Logically, they would not have done this if the freedom of the skies had been necessary to their mental health.

Obviously, the act of flying plays the central part in the ability of most bird species to sustain life, and nobody who has watched the dazzling aerobatics of, say, a peregrine falcon or a plover can believe that the bird does not take some kind of satisfaction from exercising its strength and agility. But not even all raptors depend upon flying to the same extent, and woodland owls like the tawny are among those that Nature has designed for relatively brief, low-altitude flights. In terms of human military aviation, we might think of them as ‘short-range, vertical take-off ground-attack fighters’ rather than as ‘air-superiority interceptors’ like peregrines. Mumble is a Hawker Harrier, not an F-16.

If she had been born in the wild (and, of course, if she had been among the small minority of the 1978 fledglings to survive their first couple of winters), then Mumble would spend the great majority of every twenty-four hours roosting in one of her preferred trees. During the daylight hours she would sleep or doze, tucked in concealment against the tree trunk, while she digested last night’s kills.
Before nightfall she would rouse herself, bring up the resulting pellet of waste matter, and preen her feathers in order to maintain her flying and protective surfaces in good condition. She might begin the night’s working shift by patrolling the boundaries of her territory, issuing a few challenges if she suspected there were interlopers nearby. She would then move from tree to tree by short flights, sitting for alternating spells on these regular perches while she listened and watched for the movement of prey animals.

As soon as she had killed a sufficient bag for the night – which she might achieve relatively quickly, or not until some hours had passed, depending upon the year and the season – she would return to a roosting tree. There she would eat and begin to digest her meal. At about dawn she would slip once again into a dozing state, remaining motionless among the leaves so as to stay hidden from daytime birds. Except during the springtime months when she was helping to raise a brood, she would never expend any more energy than she needed to catch enough food to sustain her own life.

It is natural that Mumble chooses to sleep or doze for much of the twenty-four-hour cycle – this is innate behaviour, not a response to captivity. She couldn’t show any less evidence of cabin fever if she tried, and her attitude to life seems to be more or less that of a lazy cat. Since she is probably fed better (and certainly more consistently) than she could feed herself in the wild, why shouldn’t she be lazy? And since she seems calm and
friendly most of the time when she is awake, I can rationalize any residual jailer’s guilt by telling myself that she is, for the most part, living a contented life. Freed from the nightly dangers of the woods and roadsides, this life will probably be a great deal longer than it would have been if she had been hatched in the wild.

The guilt cannot be entirely washed away, of course; I have a human sensibility, not an owl’s. I cannot forget that captivity denies her, if nothing else, the fundamental experience of breeding, but I find that I can live with this. Above all, nobody kidnapped her from a wild life, so she has no concept of greater freedom; and if she is often caged, then at least she has never been tethered.