Politics of Place • Green Connections • Issue 03 31
Owl Sense
by Miriam Darlington
32 Politics of Place • Green Connections • Issue 03
I was rolled in my duvet, immersed in a
dream, when a weird cry forced my eyes
open. It was the sort of cry that wrenches
goosebumps up from under your skin. A cry
that can only come from one kind of animal.
I left the depths of my pillow and went
to the window to listen. The misty field
curved over the dawn horizon; it held the
form of something, a moving shape floating
ghostly on the weak light. I dressed, pulled
on Wellingtons, a jumper, grabbed the
binoculars and headed through the houses.
Above prickles, ferns and nettles, the sign,
its white lettering declaring “Site Acquired
for Development”. I wanted to pace out
this place, find the inhabitants of this
field about-to-be-lost, this rough-edged
habitat that housed far more than its new
owners could see. I wanted to feel it before
it vanished.
Months earlier I had lain recovering from
a different sort of loss. I had been waking
early, getting up to walk off the misery,
to feel the earth’s solidity. My limbs had
become used to heaviness, my head filled
with a kind of unwelcome fug. Normally I
would have traded in the experience with
words, but when words fail, you need
another kind of transaction. Walk through
any lush June growth and it begins to get
to you, from the feet up, with its drenching
green, its animal-scents, foxgloves, seeding
grasses, its steadying of the breath.
I found bird company in this dawn-lit
between-land, filling the hedges with their
startle, jizz and twitter, running the gardens
through with their diehard ebullience,
meshing with the amenity grassland of
the human settlement. Here on the other,
richer side, beyond picket fences and patios,
rages the forgotten garden. With its small
wilderness of aphids, beetles, grasses and
voles, here is the domain of the owl.
What does an owl sense? Its body is all
sinew, air-filled bone and feather. It is
lightness and eyesight; eyes that comprise
one third of the weight of its whole skull.
My dull, human eyes take up one percent of
my head. Most of the time, we are looking
inward, or downward, missing everything
that is alive and flitting with energy.
The dense light receptors of its fovea mean
that a Barn Owl can locate prey at stunning
distances, and in near or even complete
darkness. The human equivalent would be to
see the light of a match over a mile away. But
the owl cannot turn its eyes as we do; it must
bob and swivel its whole head to capture and
focus on the object of its attention. And it
would be wrong to assume the owl’s eyes
Politics of Place • Green Connections • Issue 03 33
are its most powerful feature. We assume
that the flat, large-eyed faces somehow
resemble our own and that its senses are
similar. No, in the Barn Owl, it is the ears
that are everything. For an owl, every minute
flicker and twitch is amplified in the cochlea
and transmitted to the auditory nerve for
instant interpretation. Here is an automatic
system, one guided almost mechanically
by sound. The world must be a discordant,
distracting symphony of noise, but the
intricate ear flap made of specialized, bristly
feathers minimizes interference, prevents air
turbulence and allows precision: it locates
sound so acutely that the owl can pinpoint
prey with chilling accuracy.
my range. A split second view of it and my
heart leapt sideways, left me focused, alert.
Appearing and disappearing, it quartered
the field, this way and that, delicate,
purposeful, catching the light, visible then
with a turn of the wings, invisible. A bird
that was not bird: a ghost, a piece of mist.
Tyto alba, the Barn Owl.
I walked through the gap, into the field,
attuning my own ears to the rustling details
of the soundscape. In June, these pathways
are all shadows, leaves, roots and earth;
the uncanny strata of animal habitations,
weasel runs, vole ways. Soil trickles, leaves
drip, bird wings flicker. Here are the rusty
notes of edgelands; the places we don’t
capture, but that certainly capture us with
their million senses.
The owl vanished again, but it led my lens
to something more solid; the apex of a barn
roof, and in the gable end, a stone window
that gaped into a quiet grey world. The
first fat drops of a Devon downpour sent
me scudding inside to shelter. The floor of
the muffled interior was scattered with a
few white feathers. All around, a prickly
feeling rose up, of something alive. A hiss
bubbled from somewhere; my ears rang
with its rattlesnake presence. Hunched
and awkward in a corner, a small, downy
face and two dark, watery eyes stared. The
shock of it prickled in my hands. An owlet…
an owlet had fallen. And higher up was the
source of the hissing; a snowdrift of sibling
Above, a yawning of plane-sound, and a
view of criss-cross vapour trails in the sky.
Then something flickered on the edge of my
vision. A sense of a strangeness, a mothquiet movement of white wings just out of
And then it stooped, taking all my breath
with it, and lifted, clutching a dead thing.
I spun my focus wheel and caught its airy
form in the lens of my binoculars. The
close-up visual framed the bird in parts;
the fur-ripping talons, the smooth white
breast, the glowing corolla of its face.
34 Politics of Place • Green Connections • Issue 03
owlets huddled, calling anxiously from their
nest ledge.
What would it be like, to have bones filled
with air, wings that could spread and float
the body out, feet swept beneath belly,
talons grasping into seams of nothing? A
kind of vertigo gathered in my ankles and
spread up my spine until my entire skull
felt dizzy with it.
Over the months of my own loss I had
thought about the owls. How would they
live out the famine season, while the
ground froze and the voles died out? While
I suffered my interior weather patterns,
outdoors, it had been a bad winter for the
animals. But somehow, they had taken their
chances and made it, these owls. Through
the veils of sad news headlines, a subtle,
sinewy wildness lived on, beyond the radar
of all our clever devices.
I approached as softly as I could. The owlet
tottered, its apprehension palpable. I placed
my hands around it. The skeletal warmth,
the softness were astounding. And so light!
An extravagant body-warmer of ice-white
down wrapped its back, head and breast.
The feet struggled then calmed, its featherweight settled in my grip. The stink of
rotting mouse, vole blood and ammonia
filled my nose. The scaly feet and claws
tangled in my shirt. My hands felt awkward
and wrong, clasped around this fierce body,
its locked up power, its reptilian wildness.
***
In the hospital, I had lain in a cave of
unhappiness, the nurses’ routines whizzing
dimly around me. People came and went. I
didn’t want their condolences:
“Perhaps it was for the best.”
“There must have been something wrong,
for it to happen.”
Their voices clanged in my ears. In the bed
adjacent to mine, Beth, a sixteen year old,
had had a termination. She occasionally
looked out, raptor-like, refusing eye contact
with everybody. Both of us, in our own
ways, reminded of our own fragile fertility,
and of the stories our bodies create and
undo. We hardly spoke, I wanted to wrap
her up and tell her it would all be OK, but
what did I know?
With one hand grasping the owlet I climbed,
my fingers stretching for holds in the stone.
I tripped and dropped back down. I needed
two hands. The owlet would fit inside my
shirt; it would be safe tucked in there.
Pressed against me the young bird was
Politics of Place • Green Connections • Issue 03 35
placid, its sweaty warmth bulged through
my shirt. I couldn’t be a mother anymore,
but I could be the mother of this owlet, of
all the owlets there; mother of this barn,
mother of the field and its rough meadow. I
undid the claws from me, pushed the fallen
owlet back with the others, and let go.
***
Henry David Thoreau called for a rough,
“tawny” kind of grammar, a kind of
understanding wrought from the earth,
language that sprang from contact with
the soil, roots and all. Rough, loamy, real.
Something equal to the earth. Think of the
calligraphy earthworms make, with their
digested squiggles in the grass. Think of
the rust-coloured tussocks, the twittering
of finches, the mouse-smell of the sward.
John Clare called it “dropping down” into a
different kind of sympathy; rough grassland
seen from the seeded, matted thatch; from
root-level. And Seamus Heaney, with his
bog-inspired, home-rooted, peat-language
had a word for its pulse: “omphalos” the
Greek word for the centre, the navel. The
bottomless centre of things. Heaney repeats
the word as if it is the drawing of water from
the depths of a well, as if it is the sound of a
heartbeat: “omphalos, omphalos, omphalos”.
The thin soil here is peopled with the beat
of uncontacted tribes: flowering plants,
invertebrates, small mammals. The white
owl whose wings cobwebbed with copper
and ashes I had just seen, what value was
that? An owl that moved so silently that
it lifted the hair on the back of my neck.
The owl is weighted with so many stories;
when we encounter it we reimagine and
redefine it, our folklore annihilating its
being. The Barn Owl’s appearance and call
signalled doom, foul weather, or imminent
death. The unsettling nature of its silent
flight and human-like face haunted us
with imaginings. So a Barn Owl would be
nailed to a barn door to ward off storms
and evil. But what is the owlness of owl? It
is precarious. As agricultural production
intensifies and barn conversions drive
it away, it still rests on the edges of our
consciousness, but more and more dimly.
Little by little, the Barn Owl is fading from
our lives.
But we evolved revering these animals.
We spoke with them, thought with them,
coveted their skills, accorded them kinship.
The sepulchral spaces of churches and
monastic cloisters abound with owlsymbols. Owls decorate misericords and
are set amongst the beasts and foliage of
pew ends like mischievous guardians.
36 Politics of Place • Green Connections • Issue 03
And the consumable owl has been reduced
to an item fetishized as a collectible emblem
of cuteness, viewed adoringly on YouTube,
made into a fashion accessory, printed on
cups, clothes and calendars. Owls climb
out of biscuit packets, communicate from
mobile phone screens; their cuteness
subsumed into a kind of love which is not
love, but something else.
Where, amongst all this, is the real owl?
We would be wise to pay it some attention.
When I look at the huge lone oak standing
in the middle of the field-about-to-be-lost,
I long for an owl’s-eye view on the world.
At night I dream of going to perch there,
my bones filling with air.
***
Through the field and down along the path
by the river, something moved against the
periphery of my perception. Its shadow
prickled my senses as I felt it stray over
the grass. No sound came as it swivelled
its course and lifted on an invisible ripple.
Something tugged at the core of me.
For over a thousand years our clearings,
meadows and grassy summer pastures have
made a welcoming thatch of Velvet Grass,
Sweet Vernal-grass, Oat-grass, Fescue,
Rough Meadow-grass, Yorkshire Fog,
Brome. The rich diversity of species ensures
a heart-opening abundance of wildlife,
spaces for vole ways, weasel runnels; useful
foraging ground for our companion and
familiar, the Barn Owl.
By accident we made habitat that these
long-winged raptors could exploit, but
now there is a problem. With increasingly
unpredictable weather conditions,
conversion of its sheltering roosts and
encroaching roads, the Barn Owl is in
trouble.
***
In the weeks that followed my encounter
with the Barn Owls, a kind of listeningsensitivity came upon me. Now when I
fall sleep, vertiginous moments take hold.
I tumble from barn beams into darkness,
shock myself awake. Light sleeping, and
then full-blown insomnia have crept into
my nights. In the twilight hours I have
become owl-like.
***
The roof of the old barn has caved in now,
and the adults have flown away. The field
will be mashed and one hundred houses
built for human families. The rough meadow
will be squeezed and neatened into lawns
and flowerbeds, the map renamed to
Politics of Place • Green Connections • Issue 03 37
“Primrose Close” and “Meadow Lane”.
Everything changes. We lose our balance.
But sometimes, like the bubble in a spirit
level, we find a new equilibrium. I think
I’ll take the developers some owl boxes
for their attics and gable ends. I’ll suggest
they name their streets differently: “Tyto
Terrace”, “Raptor Way”, “Howlet Drive”. If
I could speak some tawny grammar into
common vocabulary, swoop it into a few
thoughts, how would it be? What else, after
all is prayer?