The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar (25 page)

I knew from the textbooks that Tawny Owls have this impressively clever pattern of moulting. The loss and replacement of their flight feathers begins at the inside ends of the rows of primaries and secondaries, and they lose the same feather from each wing within a few days, so that their flying balance isn’t upset for long. In the wild, how many they lose that year depends on how well they are feeding, but in any case the moulting process stops in September. The following spring it resumes, at exactly the point among the sequences of feathers that it had reached when it stopped the previous year.

Mumble often lost her first flight feather during the first three days of June – once, in a matched pair over the same night. Occasionally this didn’t happen until the 10th or 15th, and (uniquely) in the very hot summer of 1986 I didn’t note it until 25 June. Most years the diaries record that she was dropping feathers like snow by 20 June – two or four wing and tail feathers and half a dozen body feathers every twenty-four hours.

* * *

With the beginning of the moult proper – and precisely coinciding with it, whether it began early or late – Mumble’s character showed a profound change. She became a different owl, not only physically but emotionally. She made very little noise in the aviary during the light summer evenings (perhaps because her condition caused a loss of confidence?), but once I brought her in she would spend a lot of time denned up in the open night cage,
whooping quietly to herself. It was most noticeable that from being merely calm when she was with me, her mood turned positively clingy. On the first day of June one year I noted: ‘Very subdued, insecure, and
very
cuddly – just like a child that feels unwell. She couldn’t keep her beak off me for five minutes at a time; she demanded nuzzling first thing in the morning, then every few minutes for well over an hour. Lots of quiet crooning when she comes over to me.’

Every year, this was the consistent pattern throughout the three months of the moulting season. I was long past the cynical suspicion that her approaches simply meant that she was itching and wanted a scratch; she was perfectly capable of scratching and nibbling herself all over, with far defter and sharper instruments than my nose. I believe it is plausible that she felt a need for comforting reassurance during the long weeks when she could feel that she was in much less than peak condition, and there is some scientific support for the theory that mutual preening in birds reduces stress hormones.

(However, honesty forces me to note that in the wildlife studies that I have read I have found no mention of this behaviour between pairs of tawnies in the wild. June is early for a wild tawny to finish caring for its fledglings, and common sense suggests that it would be impossible for moulting to start while the parents were still engaged in the exhausting hunting cycle necessary to feed them after they begin exploring outside the nest. When the owlets are finally driven out of the parents’ territory later in the
summer the parents always separate for a few months, rather than ‘being there for each other’ during the moult.)

The need to keep up her energy to build new feathers was presumably behind the fact that on 3 June one year I noted in the evening that Mumble had caught a small mouse in the aviary during the day, and on 6 June her ‘game book’ records another one. On the evening of Wednesday 7 June I found her carrying the headless remains of a sparrow around the aviary – it was fully feathered, and must have flown in through her feeding hole (a slightly macabre thought – little did it know …). On Saturday 10 June – after noting that she had lost a couple of covert feathers, had been frantic for her breakfast chick, and was still demandingly affectionate at every opportunity – I recorded: ‘Either she kept her Wednesday sparrow cached in her hutch this long – which seems unlikely, given her sharp appetite at the moment – or she caught another for her tea. Usual muffled squawking with her mouth full sent me out at about 6pm, and there she was, carrying it around on the usual circuit of honour.’ (Mumble’s hunting behaviour is described in the next chapter.)

* * *

In the past week she has lost another couple of secondaries. Her mood remains needy and affectionate, and she’s at her most charming. She has also been a bit
more energetic and adventurous. This morning she played games among the legs of the chairs pushed up to the kitchen table, hopping precisely along from one of the stretchers to the next with fast horizontal jumps – there’s no room down there for her to spread her wings even halfway. After she got bored with this and flew up high again, she suddenly landed on the newspaper I was reading on my lap, and sat there demanding a nuzzle. When this was over she sat quietly for a moment – then POUNCED into the middle of the newspaper from a standing start. She proceeded to put the boot in with loud, almost alarming force, wings half open, dancing on extended legs and then SMASHING down with her feet. When I complained she flew up to the larder perch and carried on her mock battle, her claws now ripping like iron hooks at the cliff edge of the plywood top of the cupboard.

Moulting is fast and furious now, and she is consistently keen on a substantial daily breakfast in addition to her night-time chick. I left her out for the past two nights, and this morning when I went into the aviary I found two perfectly matching primaries – left and right mirror images – lying about a foot apart; the ‘selective symmetrical moult’ process is unmistakable. She is taking extra baths, but since the weather is very hot I don’t know if this is specifically to do with the moult or just common sense.

For the past week she has been losing one or two primaries and secondaries and many smaller feathers every day. The last tail feather went last night – she has only her big cone of downy white bum-fluff left back there. Her landings have become noticeably clumsier without her rear air-brakes, just like when she was first learning to fly. The mood of clinging insecurity and frequent demands for affectionate preening are fairly constant while we are together.

Among the downy stuff on her bum, three or four filmy feathers seem to be getting a little longer and showing a pale brown central stripe. She is very touchy about them, and chittered and moved when I gently stroked them. [I only found out later that a bird’s new pin feathers are very sensitive.] She is still bathing more often than usual, twice in the last three days – once in the aviary dish, and once in the kitchen washing-up bowl – and always leaves a few small feathers in the bathwater. Afterwards, her method of locomotion through the air cannot really be called flying. By an immense expenditure of effort she blunders vaguely from perch to perch, making a noise like a wet flag in a high wind, before arriving with all the elegance of a flung soggy towel.

She’s lost her left wing main primary – the longest feather on that wing; the equivalent on the right is still hanging in there. There’s a big cone of new, pristine white fluff on her bum, and at the top of it about nine potential new tail feathers now seem to be identifiable in a spade-shaped clump. The tips seem to be getting less filmy, and the brown brushstroke down the middle is becoming more prominent, but they show no real sign yet of developing a proper quill structure.

This morning the overnight cage had half a dozen medium-sized body feathers, a dozen of her tiniest face feathers, and a neat drift of ‘quill dust’ that nearly filled a teaspoon. She loses one or two primaries and/or secondaries each day, and a mass of smaller feathers. She seems to be quite hungry, but not frantically ravenous, and I continue to dust about every second chick with SA 37. Her mood is still very cuddly and needy; she jumps to me at every opportunity, with a lot of quiet crooning and squeaking.

She has now regrown a lovely, symmetrical fan of proper, quilled tail feathers above the cone of down. They still seem fractionally short, but she can fly well in all configurations.

Throughout July, while I’ve mostly been watching this going on at the stern, the steady loss and replacement of other feathers has continued. She does a lot of scratching and looks pretty scruffy, with half-shed feathers sticking out of her body and wing surfaces at odd angles for a day or so until they drop or she pulls them out. She is still bathing a little more often than usual, and is still dependent and demandingly affectionate.

For the past couple of weeks she’s been very hungry – she yells for breakfast every morning, so I usually give in; she knows best, after all. Her new tail is now full size and perfect in all respects. She is still occasionally dropping a big wing feather, and she is shedding back feathers too. Her head looks very scruffy and spiky, and this seems to be the main scene of action at the moment. It gives her a ‘flat-top’ look, like a military buzz-cut from the top edge of her facial disc right back to the top of her shawl feathers – this makes a weird, belligerent-looking contrast with her generally fat, fluffy appearance.

We’ve had a very hot spell recently, in the 90s F; it has now broken, but it’s still in the 70s in the middle of the day. Despite this, when I carried her out to the aviary this morning I caught the first whiff of autumn on the misty air (extraordinary how unmistakable this is, even to a smoker
like me). There is still some moulting and replacement going on, but the main flight feathers seem almost complete. Mumble seems less hungry; she’s rarely interested at breakfast time, so I’ve cut out the morning chick. Today – after an unbroken month of her positively demanding a nuzzle on her cage doorstep in the mornings – she whooped in the corner when she heard me come into the room, and when I opened her door she did not immediately bounce out. She’s still affectionate, but takes her time before making advances to me.

Her head feathers are now fully replaced, and the main action over the past couple of days has definitely been on her front. There are blizzards of fluffy breast feathers in the overnight cage, and after she’s had a bath or there has been a rain shower they stick to the mesh of the aviary walls, fluttering like little prayer-flags or Mongol standards. The faint signs of a mood change are now definite; she still accepts mutual grooming sessions, but she no longer instigates them herself.

Apart from everyday scratchings the moult seems to be over. Her mood is still friendly, but more independent. I’m going on holiday for the next couple of weeks, and I fully expect that her behaviour will have changed completely to independent autumn mode by the time I get home.

Got back from ten days in Switzerland and France. [Thanks to my old friend Gerry, this had involved many opportunities to fire a replica fifteenth-century cannon, and a lot of uproarious drinking, singing and laughing among like-minded spirits crowded around enormous camp-fires.] During my absence I had arranged for three- to four-day ration packs to be delivered to Mumble in the aviary. She’s in perfect feather all over, and looks wonderful. She’s friendly in a casual way, but not really interested in being handled. Her morning greetings are perfunctory, and she prefers to go off and sit by herself, holding inner conversations of soft, querulous warbles.

Last night there was a good deal of calling back and forth with a wild owl – she did the classic ‘kee-
wikks!
’ in answer to ‘
Hooo!
… hoo, hoo-hoo
HOOO
s
!
’ out in the trees a couple of hundred yards away.

Over the past few days she has become more nervy and active. She whoops into the corner of her night cage when she hears me come down each morning, and while she jumps out on to my shoulder she won’t stay there for long. She shows no sign of wanting closer contact on most days, and only wanders over for a brief nuzzle on weekend mornings after she has been free in the kitchen for a good hour or so. Her appetite seems to have sharpened up again,
night and morning, and she zips smartly into position at my first come-and-get-it whistle.

* * *

The notebooks record that one particular autumn her toughly independent mood then went into reverse, for no reason that I could understand. For about three weeks between late September and mid-October 1990 she reverted to quiet, gentle, hesitant behaviour. She allowed demonstrations of affection (within reason) first thing in the mornings, and would come to my patted shoulder morning and night for brief sessions of mutual preening before flying off. I noted that while paying attention to her surroundings alertly, and flying smartly from the basket to the night cage as soon as I brought her indoors, she showed a reduced appetite. Even so, while she never asked for a breakfast chick, equally she never cached an overnight snack.

Often she showed no interest in coming in for the night, so I would feed her in the aviary and leave her there. One wet, chilly night in the third week of October I went out to her at about 11.30pm during a gap in the showers. When I saw her shaking herself damply on her private perch, I thought she would be eager to come to the basket. Instead, she looked at me with a complete lack of interest – then jumped down to, and immediately into, her water dish. After doing the full ducking-and-flapping routine, she climbed up to sit on the rim while she shook herself a bit – and then jumped, splashily, straight back into
the water. This demonstration of her complete independence, whatever the weather, was slightly crushing: dismissed, I humbly laid her chick on the shelf and left her domain.

By November she was back into her unvarying winter routine, which is best described as ‘stereotypically British’ – she was perfectly civil but fairly self-contained, and only occasionally affectionate. Each morning she would warble softly into the bottom corner of the night cage when I uncovered it. She would come hesitantly to the doorstep, where she seemed to enjoy a brief greeting, but then either went back inside to her corner perch, or hopped to my shoulder and then flew directly up to her high larder-top. Usually she stayed up there for as long as I gave her the chance, but most weekends she would occasionally fly down to my shoulder or the kitchen table after an hour or so, diffidently suggesting a cuddle.