PETER QUINCE
Living as I do in a small wooded valley, I have a lot of owls among my neighbours. At night the air rings with their calls, and these black nights seem to make them especially conversational. Sometimes strangers com- plain about the din, and I remember a child being startled right out of bed by a ter- rific hoot from outside her bedroom window. But usually they screech and chatter away at a decent distance, and I have always liked to hear them.
For such very audible neighbours, though, they are seen strangely seldom. I was there- fore pleased when I was walking along the lane and a tawny owl loomed suddenly out of the trees and swooped down close to me. Owls are often glimpsed as ghostly shapes in the middle distance and it is not at all unusual to catch sight of them, looking mysteriously white, in the headlights of a car; but a close view of an owl on the hunt is more rare, and this one gave me every chance to inspect him in the dim light.
I could see that his plumage, far from being white, was in fact dark brown, and strongly barred and flecked. He was a rather impressive sight. But still more im- pressive was the effortless, masterful silence of his movement through the air. Having just heard a pigeon crashing headlong through the trees at my approach, I found the contrast striking, It occurred to me that much of the owl's sinister reputation through the ages has arisen not from its supposedly eerie and haunting- sounds but rather from its silence —its remarkable gift of silent flight. At any rate I conceded that it would have been hard not to experience a slight feeling of unease as the powerful, piirposive-looking creature materialised confidently before my eyes and seemed to hover, calculatingly, at its leisure, before making a noiseless depart- ure through a tangle of branches.
Identifying the different species of owl is not easy except for the experts (of whom I am not one). But I judged this to be the tawny, or brown owl because of its dark colouring (the barn owl is really a sort of golden-yellow tint) and also because almost immediately after its departure I heard the familiar, long-drawn-out hooting cry from nearby. And this, although often thought to be the common parlance of all members of the owl family, is supposed to be the copy- right of the tawny species.' -
Gilbert White likened this hoot to the vox humana of an organ, which is I suppose an acceptable comparison but not, perhaps, one of the great man's most scrupulously accurate observations. He was attracted by the strange repertoire of owl noises. He once got a musical friend to pay careful attention to them: he duly reported that Selborne owls hooted in three different keys, F sharp, B flat and A flat; and that he had heard two hooting at each other, the one in A flat and the other in B flat.
In addition to its theatrical, unforgettable hoot, the tawny owl also has an abrupt and piercing call which sounds, as nearly as I can express it, like 'tee-wick' delivered in tones of urgent excitement. The barn owl, by contrast, makes some very rum noises indeed. The one I hear most often is a fearful strangled screech (the species used to have the popular name or screech-owl, and no wonder) but it is also given to a threaten- ing hissing and a peculiar kind of snoring. The little owl, the third kind which I have identified among those which frequent my village, has a loud, sharp squeak, if that isn't too undignified a word to use.
It seems wrong, after all, to discuss these birds without a certain degree of decorum, for they have always possessed unusual power—as symbols of wisdom, or bringers of ill-omen, or in other weighty ways. They abound in literature: I think the line, 'The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold', is one of the more effective ornithological allusions in poetry. It is, I dare say, vulnerable to well-informed scientific criticism. Birds, especially such nocturnal birds as owls, seem equipped to keep themselves warm during any extreme of temperature which our clim- ate is likely to produce. Nevertheless, Keats's image of an owl trembling on a night of iron frost is enough to chill the blood.
But as winter approaches, and the nights grow colder, I am often grateful to the owls calling and hunting out in the starlight while we sit lazily before a fire. What could more pleasantly emphasise our privileged human comfort than those echoing - cries of the winter night? And the owls often seem to be rather jovial presences. in spite of their sinister reputation; heartless no doubt, since what they are hooting and screeching about is presumably their prey, but cheerful and with a certain piratical bravado nonethe- less. I like to hear their hollow cries as I go to bed, and if I wake up in the small hours, the echoing exchanges of the local owl population seem far more companiori- able than a blank silence,
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