The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (24 page)

I made a few ‘Happy New Year’ phone calls, during which she squeaked obligingly when I held the handset up to her. This seemed to wake her up, and she jumped from my shoulder on to the kitchen table for some mutual preening. At one point we both watched a dog in the garden, with mild interest. She hovered close when, on an
impulse, I opened the kitchen door and let her come through with me and upstairs, for a treat. This caused great excitement, but after spiralling up the stairwell she spent most of her time up there in the bedroom wardrobe, pursuing her obsessive interest in dark burrows.

When I eventually took her downstairs she hopped obediently into the basket. Once inside the aviary she went into her hutch briefly, then came out on to her doorstep for ten minutes or so while she checked out her domain. When I looked out the window at about 11.30am she was inside the hutch, and she seemed to stay there silently for the rest of the day. I heard a few tentative hoots at about 9pm. I brought her in at 11.30pm, without any objection; and so to bed.

This morning there was no cuddling. She jumped straight to my shoulder, then to the tray-perch, then up to the larder-top; and there she stayed, resisting all invitations and blandishments. As it was a vile day, with blowing rain, I left her there when I went out shopping. When I got back at about lunchtime there was evidence that while I was gone she had come down to the tray-perch, used it and returned to the cupboard (if only this was a predictable daily routine …). Again, there was no difficulty persuading her into the basket, and once in the aviary she went straight to her private-corner perch and stayed there.

For the first time this winter there are sheep in the nearest field; she seems completely uninterested in them.

When I put her in the kitchen cage last thing, it became clear that she had secretly stowed a bit of her last night’s chick under the newspaper in one corner for later – this is the first time she’s done that this year. I still gave her a whole chick tonight, and she finished both.

She’s still hiding a breakfast snack from her supper about every second or third night. This has roughly coincided with a change to much colder and windier weather, but there seems to be no exact correlation.

More noticeably, she has begun doing her ‘hoot and head-shot’ routine, as in previous winters. Is this change of behaviour connected with the mating season? When she first hears me morning and evening, there’s a great deal of ‘Indian whooping into corners’ inside the night cage and aviary hutch before she emerges into sight. Then, when I let her out in the morning, when I go into the aviary at night – and on a few occasions when I have come back into the kitchen unexpectedly while she was free – she hoots quite an aggressive challenge and flies at my head. She doesn’t strike at it with her feet, just lands on top. When I put up a wrist she steps on to it and lets herself be carried down quite calmly, and there’s no repeat of this
behaviour while she’s free. (So far, there’s no sign of the next recorded stage of the midwinter behaviour – the ‘whistling war-dance’.) She’s still generally quite sociable; she came to the shoulder unbidden during a Sunday morning newspaper session, then jumped to my crooked-up knee and craned up her face for a nuzzle in the old way, talking in soft squeaks and croons.

She’s now doing the full-blown HHS plus WWD when we meet morning and night. First the warbling into corners, then the hoot and head-shot, then the whistling war-dance – as I lift her down from my head she climbs up my arm to the crook of the elbow and kicks at it a couple of times, while giving whistling squeals and flapping her wings in an excited little spasm. And whenever I go into the aviary at night she does a lot of vigorous bat-walking across the ceiling, ending with the most amazing back-flips down again, to land sitting neatly upright on pinpoint targets like the hutch doorstep or the inside of the basket. Given the angles and distances, these three-dimensional aerobatics should be completely impossible; she makes Russian teenage gymnasts look clumsy.

* * *

Mumble’s bat-walking on her ceiling was standard behaviour each midwinter, but the onset of the hooting and head-shot plus whistling war-dance differed slightly each
year, the first element always preceding the second by a week or more. I noted them in mid- and late January respectively in most years; but in 1988 she remained positively dozy and cuddly until the last week of January, then began the HHS tentatively and inconsistently, and the WWD didn’t kick in until the first week of February. (Once she started these behaviours in any year, however, she kept up the full routine until about late May.)

At about this same time each year I also noted that she was caching part of her supper overnight, and bringing it out of the night cage with her in the morning. She then usually carried it around the kitchen in her beak from perch to perch, bugling insistently, until she finally settled to eat it on top of the larder. I always offered her a feed night and morning during cold winter weather, and she never turned down the chance of a chick. But while I didn’t make the connection at the time, I guessed later that the snack-saving might be because the twice-a-day feeds weren’t allowing her enough time between meals to digest a whole chick. I found it impressive that she realized this in advance, and had the self-discipline and foresight to stop eating halfway through and tuck the rest away for later.

In 1989 I recorded that the timetable was slightly delayed compared with the previous year. On 28 January I noted that she was doing the HHS at night but not in the morning, and there was no sign of WWD. She still liked her nuzzle on the doorstep first thing, but would only come to my shoulder or lap and demand further preening after she had been free in the kitchen for at least an hour during
long weekend mornings. (The notebook recalls that one morning she was sitting on my shoulder while I was reading the paper when she suddenly did a titanic sneeze, spattering the newspaper two feet in front of her ‘nose’. She shook her head vigorously a couple of times, but then – like me – she calmly turned her attention back to the
Sunday Telegraph
’s thoughtful analysis of the Five Nations rugby tournament.)

That January she showed no desire for breakfasts, and late in the month she had not yet started caching snacks overnight. I wondered whether the mild winter might be affecting her behaviour; we had had very few frosts that year, the crocuses were up, and even a few foolhardy daffodils. However, in mid-February 1989 I noted that she was again stowing away snacks every second or third night, and by the third week of the month it was every night – though this seemed to have nothing to do with how well I was feeding her. When she brought the snacks out of her night cage with her, she seemed to be trying to tell me something. She kept following me around with them, even bringing them to my shoulder, while giving the full hoot – ‘
Hooo!
… hoo, hoo-hoo
HOOO
!’ (though with her mouth full this sounded more like quacking). She seemed to expect me to
do
something with them. Was it possible that she was trying to feed me again?

In 1991 I noted that she didn’t start the hooting and head-shots until the second week of February, and there was no whistling war-dance on my arm until the middle of that month. Again, I’ve no idea if the weather was a factor
that year; we had an unusually severe winter, with heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures for a week in early February. Generally, this didn’t seem to inconvenience Mumble at all; she was not really bothered if she came in for the night or not, and as soon as the water in her dish melted she had a thorough bath. I found her sitting in an icy wind, soaking wet right through but apparently quite comfortable.

* * *

The pattern seems firmly established: bat-walking and back-flips, saving snacks every night, and HHS plus WWD. Her emotions are at a high pitch, and her feelings seem confused. One night when I brought her in she jumped out of the basket and flew straight into the night cage, but when I approached with a chick she flew straight out again and hovered round me at waist height, wings flapping, until I threw it in.

Much the same morning drama. She emerged carrying a full half of last night’s supper, and flew around from perch to perch, keeping close to me and all the time yelling monotonously round her beakful of chick. This went on for nearly ten minutes before she finally took it up to the larder top and ate it. I wish I could figure out what she expects me to do about this – I feel stupid in the face of
her urgent but incomprehensible nagging. Does she want me to take it from her? Is this some sort of displaced maternal behaviour? At this time of year it’s impossible to interpret what role she has cast me in, and it seems to change from one moment to the next.

When she finally finished her snack she seemed to calm down. She stropped her beak clean a few times on the ‘cliff edge’, then settled down – but not on her perch. She came right forwards to the edge of the larder cupboard and lay down flat on her front, with her breast and shawl feathers puffed up and her face resting on top of her claws. But not more than thirty seconds passed before she looked at me, did a theatrical double-take, and her eyes grew huge. She started hooting aggressively, shuffling from one foot to the other, and then flew at my head. When I put up an arm and diverted her down, she didn’t do her whistling war-dance in the crook of my elbow, but clung to it tensely, mantling her wings and giving occasional hoots. She let me cuddle her for a moment, then flew off high again – and soon afterwards back into the cage, where she started her monotonous whooping into a corner. This has
got
to be something to do with the nesting season.

The signs of confused restlessness continue, and she’s still stowing away a snack almost every night. Very frequent hooting and head-shots followed by whistling war-dances. There is a lot of noise and ricocheting around in the aviary
if she happens to see anyone or anything moving, even on sunny afternoons when she should be sleeping.

I notice that I have a robin’s nest in the hedge; as they go about their endless hunt for food she pays no attention to them, nor they to her.

Same noisy, rough behaviour, but this morning, for the first time in weeks, there was no sign of a cached snack. At night she headed into the cage like an arrow as soon as I opened the basket, and into a corner to start her Indian whooping. When I threw her supper in she scuttled across to grab it – whooping on the approach, and quacking brassily on the retreat with it in her beak – and after she’d eaten it I heard her singing out challenging hoots for quite a long time after I’d gone to bed. I’ve noticed a couple of small down feathers on the night-cage floor – too early in the year to be significant? Still, at the same time as all this drama she will tolerate the occasional brief preening session.

Over the past month there have been steadily fewer snacks cached overnight, and it’s now down to about one every third day. There’s still a lot of noise, day and night, and a lot of HHS and WWD when we meet. But if I refuse to take all the dramatics seriously she can sometimes be talked out of it by my nuzzling her head during the
war-dance phase, though she’s pretty grudging about it, and seems distracted.

Only one snack cached over the past week. The usual HHS and WWD when I let her out this morning; but – for the first time since the end of January – this was followed, after a thoughtful pause, by her instigating a lengthy mutual preening session at the kitchen table. She repeatedly came, unbidden, to my shoulder, lap or the table under my face, and there was much pleasurable head-barging and nibbling, enlivened at intervals by pounces into my newspaper.

This morning she did the usual whooping into a corner when I came into the kitchen; but when I opened the cage she came to her doorstep and sat quietly, blinking and craning her face up for the first proper ‘good-morning’ caresses for about three months. The night routine wasn’t quite so aggressive, either. When I went into the aviary she did the HHS and WWD routine, but only briefly and half-heartedly, as if simply because she felt it was expected of her. Then, instead of bat-walking, she jumped promptly into the basket.

* * *

The diaries show that this change of behaviour from rough, fidgety and distracted to positively friendly began between 22 and 27 May every year. Once it began, it was consistent: she was calm and sweet-natured, expecting a nuzzling session first thing in the morning, and when we spent hours together at weekends she approached me often, demanding more. She hardly ever cached bits of her supper overnight, and never after 1 June; instead, she demanded a whole chick each breakfast time as well as one most evenings (naturally, I had been dunking her rations in supplement powder for a couple of weeks already). Although the hooting and head-shots and whistling war-dances might recur very intermittently, they were increasingly brief and half-hearted, and I never noted them later than 31 May. One year I recorded that on 24 May I saw her adopting her ‘broody egg-sitting’ pose on one of the kitchen worktops, but this was brief and unrepeated.

By these last ten days of May I was watching out for her to begin her moult, but I noted very little feather loss, and then only small contour feathers. The follicle of a living feather has a blood supply, and when the old feather falls out a new one starts to grow immediately from the same follicle. The replacements emerge as ‘pin feathers’, which are tightly furled inside a thin shaft that soon splits open to allow them to grow and deploy. The earliest Mumble ever lost a flight feather was 26 May one year, when I found a secondary in the night cage; another year she lost one on the 30th, and a pair of primaries and the matching secondary during the first week in June.