The Company of Owls E-Book

Polly Atkin

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 239

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Share in the company of owls in this nocturnal love song… From the author of Some of Us Just Fall, longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. 'I couldn't put down this warm and comforting, beautiful book.' Ajay Tegala, author of Wetland Diaries ___ In the woods above Polly Atkin's home in Grasmere, Cumbria live the tawny owls she calls her neighbours. Each night, they come down to her cottage at dusk, calling out as night falls – in particular a trio of owlets she watches grow from fledglings to young adults. As the antics of the owl siblings develop – their capacity to play, to bicker, to share and to protect – they encourage her to think differently about some of the big needs of all our lives: solitude and companionship, care and belonging, rest and retreat. And into the frame step questions about all sorts of relationships, from how we feel when in darkness to the homes and connection we so desperately seek. The Company Of Owls is a love song to these incredible creatures, and a reflection on what makes them, and us, unique. It's a call to find joy in unexpected places and times. It is a lesson in learning to listen – to really listen – when all around us seems clamour and noise. ___ 'Rarely have I found a book so transporting, so moving.' Jessica J. Lee, author of Dispersals 'A beautiful guide to moving through this world with tender curiosity, joy and reflection.' Sally Huband, author of Sea Bean

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Prologue

Midsummer Owl

Owls of Lakeland

Owl Summer

Lockdown Owl

Uplokkid

Uncertain Human

A Short History of Owls in Grasmere

Learning the Owls

Onlihede

Branching

The Human Who Was Afraid of the Dark

Owlets on Owlets

Burying the Owl

Co-habitation

Branching Out Early

Reclused

Owlets! Owlets! Owlets!

Night People

Explorers

Dispersal

Ghostlets

Owl Eyes

Remote Owls

Connection

Protection

Listening in Three Dimensions

Passage Visitors

Home

Solnes

Day Owls on the Lonely Moor

Hope

Moss Owls

Spring

Acknowledgements

References

Let me tell you about my neighbours, the owls.

Let me tell you about what I have learnt of them, the ways of them, over the years I have lived alongside them. Their lives of nighthunt and dayrest, their lives amongst trees and their lives amongst houses. Let me tell you what I have learnt about everything else through them. About difference and aloneness and companionship and difficulty. About sensitivity and materiality. About watchfulness and vocalness. About survival and joy. About the choices we make to protect those we care for and the choices we make to protect ourselves. About knowing which to focus on at any one time. When to tolerate disruption, when to leave. Let me tell you what I know and let me tell you about everything I don’t know. That this too is a kind of knowledge you might find in a twilit wood, or in the small hours, as you sit alert, listening for proof that you are not the only living thing left after all.

For a long time, I knew I lived amongst owls, but I did not see them. This is how it is for so many of us.

My first year in Grasmere I lived in the attic room of a Victorian cottage shared with two other humans, my bed tucked under the eaves. I would hear owls at night, so close they sounded as though they were sitting on the outer sill of my one small window. I recognised them from their voices as tawny owls, the owls of the woods, the owls of picture books, who give us the sound we are taught as children that all owls make – tu-whit tu-who. The sound notated by Shakespeare and Thomas Vautor, and by William Wordsworth, whose writing had brought me to this place. The owls of my own childhood home – the only kind I had ever seen in the wild. So I knew enough to know who they were as they sat above and around my attic bedroom, one calling ke-wick! ke-wick! into the starlight, another answering hoo-hooooo.

I imagined I could feel them peering in at me, could hear their beaks tap against the glass, but if I drew aside my makeshift curtain, there was never any sign of them. Still, I knew they were there, maybe perched on the lintel just over my head. In the winter as I lay awake shivering, watching my breath cast icy planets into the cold room, it comforted me to think of their warm bodies beyond the frost-scrawled glass. There was life out there, life going on. I realised they must live in the trees of the gardens or the woods above Town End and come down at night to hunt around the little hamlet whilst we humans were all tucked away and out of sight. I knew the slate walls of the cottages and their yards were wriggling with bank voles and weasels and wood mice and slow worms: a veritable feast for my neighbours, the owls.

One warm night in my first summer here a barn owl swooped over the beer garden of the pub as I sat out with friends – a pale spectre blotting out the stars for just a moment as I happened to look up. No one saw it but me. It might as well have been a ghost.

I caught no sight of the tawny owls, though I kept on hearing them. I heard them calling from the woods at night and on winter afternoons, and I heard them from every room I slept in. Ten years passed in which I never saw them, in which they were voices in the dark that may as well have had no bodies. I moved out of my attic and down to Lancaster, then home to Nottingham for ten months, during which time my parents moved from the house I grew up in, with its owl-friendly garden, to a smaller house with a neat and manageable yard. I moved back to Grasmere with my partner, renting a freezing flat then a flooding cottage at the north end of the village, next to a wood from which owls would call at night. Still, we never saw them; only late one night on the drive back from Manchester a tawny owl flew from the shore of Rydal Water over the car as we wound along the lake road. I thought it was going to hit the windscreen, but it skimmed over us and away. We had been in Manchester to hear Neko Case play. She had sung her song with the line ‘my love, I’m an owl on your sill in the evening’ and we’d sung along, inside and outside the glass of the window ourselves. We knew the owls were around us, all the time. We suspected they simply did not wish for us to see them. We respected their position. Who wants to be overseen as you go about your daily, nightly, business? We knew they were there, like a new moon. We did not need visual proof.

Eventually we found ourselves back where I began my life in Grasmere: renting a seventeenth-century farm labourer’s cottage right next to the house where I’d once haunted the attic. And once again living with the owls’ nightly visitations. Owls on the roof and the windowsill all winter. Owls singing me to sleep. Owls keeping me company when sleep will not come or the noise of my body will not let me sink into it. Eventually, owls visible to the human eye.

I’m going to tell you about my neighbours, the owls, but what I can tell you about them is only what a neighbour knows. I am not a naturalist or an ornithologist. I am no expert in things owls or owlish. I just live next to some. Everything I know about my neighbours, the owls, I know through the imperfect lens of my own watching, my own earthbound body, my own heavy head and all it has hoarded over my lifetime. It is knowledge gleaned in fragments, learnt through coincidence and chronic illness. I cannot wait unmoving in the cold or the dark for hours in the hope of a sighting, or carry myself to places on foot far from home or the road or safe paths to seek them out. This book is about owls, but it is also about me. My knowledge is casual, accidental, filtered through pop culture and literature and entirely tempered by partiality. Because I love my neighbours, the owls. I love them and I want you to love them too.

Midsummer Owl

The first time I saw one of my neighbours, the owls, up close in good light was on 21 June 2017. The summer solstice. It was an auspicious meeting.

My partner Will and I had wandered up the old road away from our home after work, to catch the long light of midsummer. It was the best kind of June evening – warm and bright – everything shimmering and dappled with green treelight. We ambled up to the tarn, where the copper beech was backlit and glowing bright pink, the sun splitting through it onto the single-track road. We turned and carried on up to the common, seeking the light. We clambered up a little crag that was still in full sun, and stood in it, drawing it into ourselves. Everything was bright primary green, bright blue, the bog almost covered over with sudden growth and the white tufts of cotton grass, the whole moss in flower. Below us, Rydal Water was a mirror to the sky. The bracken was already high and meeting over the paths and we couldn’t go much further on our usual circuit, so we turned around and walked back down to the tarn. As we picked our way down the narrow path, we were looking out for the heron who skulks in the shallow water, but instead noticed an unusual shape in a mossy oak growing beside the water. Tucked into the nook where the lowest branch split from the trunk, there was the unmistakable shape of a tawny owl, a chestnut oval against pale green. She was looking away from us, her gaze fixed on something in the drystone wall bounding the garden of the cottages by the tarn. All of the small birds were alarming, giving away her presence even if we hadn’t seen her, lit up in the tree. As we reached the road, she looked round, and straight at us, a long black-eyed stare, before turning back to her business. We stood like that for as long as we thought she would tolerate our gaze. Every now and again she would turn her head to check what we were doing, what threat or disturbance we posed, blinking before turning back to the wall. Two things we noticed: she was beautifully coloured, her head and shoulders not so much brown as strikingly auburn, with a cream St Andrew’s cross over her beak, and lighter feathers on her belly. Also, she did not seem to be concerned to be observed. Cautiously we crept around the other side of the tree to get a better look. She carried on blinking down at us, and down at the wall. When we decided we had troubled her enough, we walked on, left her to catch her dinner.

The only time I’d had such a good view of a tawny owl in the wild before this had been in the garden of the house I grew up in, the year I lived at home with my parents for a few months when I was too ill to continue my adult life alone. I had come home to recuperate, to not pay rent whilst I could not work because I could not talk. I felt myself slipping away from myself, reverting to an earlier template of my life, my understanding of my place in the world. Everything I had been working towards seemed to be either in stasis or drifting further and further from me by the week. I knew I was ill, but no one would take my knowledge seriously. The house was up for sale, and I should have been enjoying this last chance to live in the home I had known for longest, but instead it chafed. My room was not my room any more, long since turned into a space for guests. Soon none of it would be mine. But one afternoon I came out of the house, drawn by a blackbird alarm in the front garden, and there, high up in one of the old trees that pre-dated the building of the house, a tawny owl was perched on a branch, pressed against the trunk. I watched it for a while, as it watched me, its black eyes following my movement as I tried to get good look without agitating it. I wanted to show it to Will when he came home from work, but when I tried to point it out the flag of my arm startled it, and it flew off before he could follow my line of sight. At the time I could not help but experience this as a kind of message – of what, I wasn’t exactly certain. The owl seemed to me a courier of possibility, a doorway opening. I missed Grasmere so much. Even though I knew it was magical thinking, I was sure the owl had come to bring me back.

Owls of Lakeland

There are five species of owl that live wild in these Lakeland uplands: tawny owls, barn owls, long-eared and short-eared owls, and little owls. Until recently I would have told you only two of these five are known to be resident in Grasmere – tawny owls and barn owls. But in 2023 little owls were seen and heard around the village, up Easedale Road and even around Broadgate in the village centre. I have looked for them, but I have not seen them – the owl of the goddess Athena – tiny, furious and iconic. But I have heard them. I hope one day to see their glare directed at me.

There are barn owls too, though I do not see them often at our end of the village. There are not many barns left open to owls in the valley any more, though we know of one farm with a healthy barn owl population in full-time employment managing the equally healthy rat population. We have heard stories of people shooting the rats and hanging them out for the barn owls to take, finding them all gone in the morning. The most recent Cumbria Bird Atlas describes barn owls as ‘a fairly common resident’ that ‘breeds in small numbers’.1 One warm spring twilight in 2018 we saw a barn owl hunting from the sixteenth-century bank barn at How Top Farm. We stood on the road, transfixed, as it surveyed the dell by the duck pond. The following year the barn was sold along with the farmhouse and the adjoining land, and its conversion from owl-friendly accommodation began.

Both long- and short-eared owls are nomadic, often travelling huge distances over sea and land to settle in the British Isles, for a season or longer. Short-eared owls roost and hunt on grassland and bogs, but long-eared owls need a mixture of habitats – woodland for nesting and moorland or farmland for hunting. This combination is getting harder to find, and through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the numbers of long-eared owls settling in Cumbria have fallen. Cumbrian conservationist Chris Hind describes the long-eared owl as ‘being pushed to the very furthest reaches of our landscape in its attempts to find suitably undisturbed locations for hunting and nest sites’.2 So it is that long-eared owls are now so elusive you won’t find any in this book, aside from here, so please don’t be disappointed if you don’t catch a glimpse of one. I haven’t either, though I would love to stumble upon a wood full of them, as was possible in the late nineteenth century. I have not seen a short-eared owl in Grasmere. The ones that appear in these pages dwell further afield in the outlying fells, though it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn there are some living just a mile or two from me, and I wouldn’t know.

I have used the word ‘Lakeland’ to describe the place or places of these owls. I use it not just to call up the Romantic past of this upland country, but to locate us – you, me, the owls – in the unbounded place of the imagination that pre-exists the Lake District National Park and wavers in and out of county jurisdictions. The other names of this place have become overly complicated in recent years. Can I still talk of the owls of Cumbria, the county I moved to in 2007, which was created by combining Westmorland and Cumberland and the Sedbergh Rural District and Lancashire North of the Sands in 1974, and was abolished and split in 2023 into two new counties: Cumberland, and Westmorland and Furness? Or do I need to resurrect those older borders and loyalties to understand our owl genealogies? To slip through realities to the timeline in which you can stand on Wrynose Pass and cross three counties with one body at once? Many of the older records are split into birds of Cumberland and birds of Westmorland, or, to cross counties, birds of Lakeland. To the owls, none of these namings and renamings and drawing and redrawing of maps means much at all, unless it impacts on their safety, their right to live and hunt and roam through these non-apparent fences.

The owls of Lakeland are also owls of Solway Firth and the Yorkshire Dales and the Pennines and shifting sands. They are upland owls and lowland owls and coastal owls of many kinds. They are owls whose ancestors have been living in these isles since before they were isles, when we were linked to Continental Europe by Doggerland. They are owls who floated in by accident and stayed, or who escaped domesticity to rewild themselves. They reflect histories of small-scale farming and of grand estates, of rural industry and abandonment, of residents and passage visitors, of migration and displacement.

In the UK more widely, some people would stretch to include other owls in this list of species, blown-ins like the snowy owls who nested in Shetland in the 1960s and 1970s and still occasionally appear here, or the eagle owls whose very existence here remains controversial, with conservationists and ornithologists arguing amongst themselves about whether any of the growing wild population could have travelled to these isles themselves, or whether they are all descendants of escaped captive birds. In 2020 my dad picked up the hoot of an eagle owl on the outskirts of Nottingham. Whether feral or a new arrival, we never discovered. I imagined it sitting in the top of one of the huge old trees around the edge of the golf course at the end of my parents’ road, calling out to see if anyone called back. A lonely life, when there are only forty breeding pairs at most living free in the UK.

Eagle owls have been spotted on the loose not far from Grasmere too. My friend Loren was alarmed to find an ‘owl the size of a toddler’ sitting casually in a tree at Ruskin’s View in Kirkby Lonsdale several years ago. It turned out to be an escaped eagle owl from a nearby bird-of-prey centre. It was captured and not left to join the growing wild population. Many of the confirmed breeding pairs of eagle owls in the UK outside Scotland have been based in the north of England though. From the mid-nineties to the mid-noughties, one pair in the North York Moors raised twenty-three chicks, counted and ringed in the nest. This success garnered unwanted attention, and the female was found, shot dead, in 2006. In 2015 a breeding pair in the Forest of Bowland, just south of Lakeland, abandoned their nest because of human disturbance. In 2016 a pair made headlines when they settled in Nidderdale, to the east of us. A pair was spotted preparing to nest in the north Pennines, at the eastern fringes of Cumbria. I like to think there may be some living in the wilder parts of wider Lakeland, under the radar, confusing hikers with their call like a throaty laugh.

Though their presence has caused rows about their status between bird protection charities, one way of looking at it is that they are merely re-establishing populations lost through habitat disturbance and persecution. As Andrew Gilruth of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust argues:

The Scots Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Irish Gaelic languages all have words for [eagle owls] and it is generally agreed that fossil records indicate eagle owls were present in Britain from some 700,000 years to at least 10,000 years ago [. . .] – ten times longer than anatomically modern humans.3

Under these terms, it is perhaps they who should be complaining about our presence.

The little owl has been well established in the UK for over a century, but it is not a native bird to these isles. People still argue about exactly when it first settled here, and how. Little owls were popular pets in the nineteenth century. Florence Nightingale kept one, which she named Athena. Athena’s taxidermied corpse is on display in the museum dedicated to Florence. Florence loved her owl very much, and their story is often depicted as a heart-warming tale of interspecies bonding, but if that is the kind of story you like, I should warn you not to look it up and find out more details, as I did. Becoming domesticated did not end well for Athena.

Little owls are not generally believed to be nomadic like short- and long-eared owls, so the wild population in the UK is often attributed to the deliberate release of imported owls or the escape of pets. It is known, for example, that little owls were deliberately released from estates in Yorkshire in 1843, 1890 and 1905, as reported in the journal British Birds in 1908: ‘As long ago as 1843 Charles Waterton liberated five Little Owls, which he had brought from Rome the previous year, in Walton Park, Yorkshire, and of late years (about 1890 and again in 1905) Mr. W. H. St. Quintin has turned out some of these birds at Scampston Hall, Rillington.’4 These releases ‘did not do very well’ though, and no wild populations grew from them. The first release that seems to have flourished in the British climate was in Northamptonshire in 1890. These little owls spread so rapidly that they were spotted in Rutland in 1891, where they were breeding by 1895. In 1896 they were found in several places in Nottinghamshire. Other releases in the late nineteenth century – in Kent and at Knepp in Sussex – did not lead to the same spread of birds.

Do these releases account for the current wild population, estimated somewhere around four or five thousand pairs? In 1873 John Gould describes the little owl as an ‘accidental visitor’ with occasional breeding, listing sightings that pre-date any of the known releases.5 In his 1886 study The Birds of Cumberland, Hugh Macpherson calls the little owl ‘an accidental visitant from Central Europe’, but adds what he considers a dubious account from much earlier in the century.6 This is a first-hand observation by John Gough, who recorded two pairs of little owls living in Middleshaw in Westmorland in 1811. One pair nested in a barn, the other ‘bred in a chimney in the same neighbourhood a day or two before’.7 Gough noted, ‘they frequently fly by day, and do not court the shades of night so much as the other species’. Macpherson guesses the two pairs must have been ‘introduced and liberated by some gentleman residing in the neighbourhood’. Gough, honoured as a natural philosopher and scientist in his own lifetime, had become blind after a smallpox infection when he was a toddler. He identified birds by sound. There is no reason to doubt Gough’s record as Macpherson does – Gough generally knew what he was talking about. Whether the birds he observed survived and bred is a different matter, but there is certainly a thriving wild population in the north of the county now, where I am told little owls frequently terrorise cyclists and drivers on the back roads. Susan, a writer who lives near Carlisle, told me, ‘On cold nights they can be found warming their feathery little bottoms on the road, looking like they are injured until you are so close you can just see a furious little face glaring at you.’ She also told me, ‘One once flew into the open window of a friend’s van while he was driving. It sat on the passenger seat and glared at him as if to say, “Well? Drive!”’ I like to think these little owls have been radiating fury towards Cumbrians for over two hundred years.

Worldwide there are over 250 recognised species of owl, with more being added all the time. I’m not sure how pleased with ourselves we should be for encroaching on the lives of owls who have been living for thousands of years – or tens of thousands of years – unregistered, unconfirmed. It is useful to be reminded how limited our knowledge of the cohabitants of our planet remains.

When I first moved to Grasmere I was excited to find out that nearby Muncaster Castle was home to the World Owl Trust – an owl conservation charity that housed 200 owls of fifty different species – although they were forced to relocate in 2015. There is still a smaller hawk and owl centre at the castle. I would visit them and wonder at all these birds with such different characteristics, such different needs and wants and ways of living, that humans are so fascinated by but know so little about. Even then I did not know how many kinds of owls lived around me, and how much I had to learn about how little I understood.

Owl Summer

The weather had broken just after solstice, the next weeks wet and humid, rain giving way to rainbows just before sundown. We expected our solstice visitation to be a one-off encounter – a gift from another realm – but on the 24th of June, Midsummer’s Day itself, I saw the owl in the drizzly light of the long gloaming, again by the tarn cottages. This time she was sitting high in a tree hanging over the tarmac on the other side of the road.

And again, 6 July. This time she was perched on top of the low mossy drystone wall at the back of the tarn, disguised as a tree stump as she leaned down, watching some potential meal move below amongst the long grass and foxgloves. I watched her from the road for five minutes before she flew up to the great old oak that grows in front of the cottages. There was something about the angle of her huge head as she looked down, a kind of graciousness, the lushness of her feathers, her still, cutting gaze. I adored her.

For weeks then I see her again and again. Her striking chestnut feathers and her indifference to human attention marking her out as one of a kind. She seems particularly fond of a spot of sunbathing, positioning herself high up in a tree and taking in the warmth. ‘Me too, owl,’ I say to her. ‘Me too.’ Every time I walk near the tarn or onto the common I look for her; for her top-heavy shape standing out on a branch or nestled against a trunk; for the commotion of songbirds that signals she is near.

Every time I see her, she is preoccupied with hunting. Like the wise owl she seems to be, I am sure she knows I am not a threat, and that is why she ignores me. I am sure she recognises me, me and Will, that it shows in the shake of her head, a slow blink that says, ‘You again?’, before she turns and gets on with whatever she was doing before we stepped into her range.

Much later I realise she must have been hunting for her young as well as herself. I didn’t know then that tawny owls feed their owlets for months after they are born, all through the summer, until they gain full independence in the early autumn. I didn’t know that female tawny owls are larger than males, heavier, with a broader wingspan, and are generally stronger hunters. That apart from the few weeks a brooding tawny owl might spend in the nest keeping eggs and owlets warm, she will shoulder most of the responsibility of feeding the family.

Our human gaze was simply the least of her worries.