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Long-eared owl in flight

Blood Owls

By Chris Arthur

To see a long-eared owl gliding in the dusk is to witness an airborne droplet of the ancient sea of owl.

 
These are not things you would associate with liquid:

  • Perching motionless for hours, hidden in a tree.
  • Flying silent and invisible across a field.
  • Navigating safe passage through the dark.
  • Dropping with lethal precision in a calculated pounce.
  • Coughing up bone and fur-filled residue.

Yet it is in terms of liquid that I think about them now, the owls that so entranced me all those years ago. Then, although fugitive, rare, elusive, hard to see, they still seemed ordinarily solid. Like hawks and wrens, blackbirds, sparrows, and finches, owls were part of the accustomed birdlife in those few wooded acres of the County Antrim countryside that I spent so much time exploring as a boy.

Of course it would never happen, but supposing an owl let you reach out and grasp it, it would—like any bird—resist the hand with its presence. Instead of encountering no more resistance than a pool of water would create, the grip would close on the body’s feathered substance. Its live flesh, muscled beneath the softness, might be startling in terms of the shock of reaching out and finding a wild thing still there, shimmering with vibrancy beneath your fingers. But for all the strangeness of finding it not fled, it would still fall within the repertoire of what’s material, concrete, corporeal; it would never be mistaken for the feel of liquid.

What changed, so that in my recollection of them now owls have acquired a fluidity that never struck me then? Can the cumulative weight of passing years act upon a memory so that, eventually, it changes form, turning even the hardest pearl of compacted remembrance back into the water of what passes? Does the freezing of a moment that’s saved from the oblivion of forgetting inevitably thaw over time, so that the icescapes of the past melt in our mental grasp, slowly changing shape until they merge with the fathomless waters of what’s forgotten, its bleak expanse unmarked by any breath of those mnemonic currents whose ripples prompt the phantasms of recall?

Although the mysterious fluid mechanics of memory no doubt play a part in things, I think this metamorphosis of owls stems mostly from an insight that’s grown as I’ve aged. This recognizes that even the best sightings I had back then were only minutely fractional. Decades separate the writing of these reflections from my boyhood owl-watching, but I can remember a few cameo scenes with a vividness that shrinks the years. For instance:

  • The moment when an owl flew directly towards where I lay concealed, watching. It came so close that even in the failing light of dusk its eyes seemed to blaze.
  • Discovering a roosting owl one summer’s afternoon, its presence in a spruce tree betrayed by a scattering of pellets on the ground below. Looking up, the rich colors and intricate patterning of its plumage were set off to perfection against the dark trunk and foliage.
  • Climbing to a nest and finding two owlets, strange, otherworldly-looking creatures, gazing back at me.

But despite their lasting impact, I realize now that the nature of these encounters was very different from how I perceived them at the time. What felt like complete experiences, satisfying in their wholeness, were no more than tiny droplets, spray from the huge waves of an ocean I was blind to. It surged its presence through every conduit of circumstance in that place; every moment was tidal in the immensity of what it carried, suffused with a cargo that dwarfed my simple way of seeing. Yet it’s only now, in retrospect, that I can sense the water’s presence, feel something of its scale and power, hear the roaring of the surf.

Perhaps I needed this space of years to pace through—stepping back and further back—until those days came into proper focus. Maybe up close, in the immediacy of our lived moments as they happen, the voltage of experience is so intense that it demands instant earthing through the vocabulary of the accustomed. Thus we label and name things according to the taming metrics of the mundane. But time’s passage has afforded me safe distance. A different picture now explodes out of the constraints of the everyday.

If you take an owl’s primary wing feather and sweep it vigorously through the air, it makes only the faintest whisper. You have to concentrate to hear it.

The long-eared owl (Asio otus) is very much a creature of the night. That doyen of bird photographers, Eric Hosking, describes them in his autobiography An Eye for a Bird as “the most nocturnal of all the British breeding owls.” They are superbly adapted for hunting in the dark. Their eyes are rich in cone cells to enhance night vision. According to John Lewis-Stempel (in The Secret Life of the Owl), a long-eared owl would be able to see a mouse in a light level equivalent to a single candle burning in an area the size of a football stadium. Their hearing is honed to a similar pitch of sensitivity. Large, asymmetrical ear openings are designed to detect tiny squeaks and rustles and pinpoint their location. The owl’s own flight is silenced so that prey will not be warned of its approach, nor will the owl’s aural scan be muddied by the sound of its own movement. Feathers are fringed along their leading edges and have a velvety pile on their surface. This mutes the sound they make when the bird is moving. If you take an owl’s primary wing feather and sweep it vigorously through the air, it makes only the faintest whisper. You have to concentrate to hear it. The feather of a crow or pigeon moved in the same way is raucous by comparison.

Although worldwide it has an extensive breeding range—across much of Europe and many areas in North America and Asia—this is yet an uncommon and secretive species. The RSPB—Britain’s leading bird conservation charity—describes long-eared owls as breeding “thinly” across the country and estimates that there are only somewhere in the region of 1,800 to 6,000 pairs. It’s not surprising, therefore, that most people have never seen one. This contributed strongly to the allure they held for me. Their rarity enhanced a sense of having glimpsed something special, secret, verging on the sacred, on those rare occasions when I had the good fortune to spot one. Seeing a sparrow was commonplace. For an adolescent boy fired with a fierce nature mysticism and thirsty for wild traces of the numinous, seeing an owl was akin to the revelation of a grail. But what I didn’t realize then was that even in the most hallowed moments of encounter I was only seeing a fraction of what was there. The categories by which I understood the world sold it short. They bought into a kind of cognitive bankruptcy underwritten by the base metal of the commonplace rather than the gold of wonder. It’s taken me years to see how the economy of the everyday, by which we measure the bulk of our experience, is calibrated according to a scale that’s sized to miss much more than it catches.

I’m not saying that I see the whole picture now—no one can do that—but I think I see significantly more of it than I did back then—or at least recognize, as I didn’t when I was a boy, how partial our experiences are, even when they strike us as compellingly complete.

Long-eared owl skull
Long-eared owl skull.
Photo by Lucy Arthur.
Describing something is never easy. That’s not surprising given how words fit—don’t fit—the world. What we experience can be conveyed, but never completely captured, on the page. Sentences hint, suggest, point at things, drape their verbal overlay across the landscapes that we want to talk about. Words are designed to represent, not reproduce. If they’re well cast they can nudge other minds into the same broad currents of feeling and cognition that move the writer. But the flow of subjectivity remains inviolably private; we each navigate our own individual life-streams and no one else can know as we do the weather of our waters, its intimate array of flavors. Writing lets us craft approximations, often to a high degree of likeness, but it can’t conjure the perfect echo of facsimile. Words are for map-making, not replicating the territories they’re concerned with.

The descriptions of owls I like best aren’t the ones that attempt a visual transcription—the sort that try to recreate the bird in words, with details of size, shape, and color given in order to aid identification. I prefer those that take a less literal approach. For instance, “an owl is a cat with wings” (John Sparks & Tony Soper, Owls: Their Natural and Unnatural History), or—looking at owl pellets rather than the birds themselves—John Lewis-Stempel’s picture of them as “little cabinets of macabre curiosities”. But owls as liquid? That doesn’t sound promising at all. How can such an unlikely linkage convey anything except the oddness—the inappropriateness—of the parallel it’s suggesting?

Somewhere in the world right now, this moment, as your eyes touch this sentence, owl blood is being pumped around the network of thousands of owl bodies, as it has been pumped for centuries and will be for centuries to come.

The liquid view of owls I’ve come to have might be described as “haemocentric,” given how much it focuses on the lifeblood that they carry. Of course thinking of owls “carrying” their own lifeblood risks creating an erroneous picture. Far from being some kind of cargo that they bear, blood is an intimately integral part of them. It’s not as if they load and store it in some hold that’s separate from themselves, then batten down the hatches so that it can be safely transported from A to B. Blood rather facilitates their entire alphabet of movement. Its percolation through the labyrinth of arteries and veins, the network of capillaries that riddles every tissue, is what fires the metabolism with the oxygen it needs. In addition, blood carries nutrients and chemical messengers around the cells, transports waste, drives and shunts and filters its cocktails of exquisitely balanced compounds through every region of the bird’s corporeality. Kept moving at exactly the right pace by the heart’s pumping metronome, blood bathes the flesh, soaks through it, seeps into every muscled nook, warms with its flow the entire territory of the feather-clad body. Blood and owl are closely interwoven. It’s not a case of one carrying the other; one is the other—blood is a constituent not a cargo.

This close entwinement of bird and blood notwithstanding, my liquid view of owls highlights blood and imagines it as something more than whatever happens to fill the arteries and veins of any one particular bird. How many fluid ounces of blood does a single long-eared owl contain? How many gallons would there be supposing every owl in Ireland, Britain, Europe, the world was drained into a common reservoir? How much owl blood has there been in the history of this species taken in its entirety, from the first appearance of Asio otus millions of years ago to whatever point in time will see the final faltering heartbeat of its last surviving representative? It would, no doubt, be possible to estimate plausible answers to these questions. But I ask them not so much to spark a set of sums, calculate amounts, as to shift attention from the usual way of seeing owls—the way I used to see them—to the way I see them now.

When did owls begin? When did their blood start to flow? It’s not yet possible—it may never be possible—to plot the precise coordinates for the point of genesis that saw Asio otus’s first appearance in the world, or to trace out the course these creatures have followed in the years since then. Yes, we can assess with some accuracy their current global distribution, compare population densities at different sites, but the long history behind the present situation becomes progressively uncertain the further back we go—though analysis of mitochondrial DNA may hold the promise of unravelling things in more detail. The oldest owl fossils yet discovered date from nearly 60 million years ago. But paleo-ornithology is fraught with difficulties. Being thin and hollow, bird bones are fragile and easily destroyed. Accordingly, the avian fossil record is slight, uncertain, incomplete. Fossils of birds are scarce, hard to identify, and harder to read into the specifics of particular species.

But even if we can’t fully map the emergence and evolution of owls as a family, still less pick out the genealogies of the different species, we know enough to recognize that this is a long-established life form. Each owl I saw in those few wooded acres of the County Antrim countryside was an instantiation of something ancient, an individual reiteration of a body-plan whose blueprint was drawn up aeons before that brief moment of encounter. Each owl I saw represented the tip of a living thread embroidered into time. Bird after bird after bird after bird were the needles that pulled it forward, snaking through the centuries, passing owl from body to body as if a feathered bucket-chain had formed to carry this precise formula of life from its source to its conclusion.

I’ve come to think of owls as something liquid because a flow traces more accurately the shape of what they are than anything that’s fixed and static. To see a long-eared owl gliding towards me in the dusk is to witness an airborne droplet of the ancient sea of owl, a fragment of a flying wave moving to tidal rhythms formed in another era and incised upon this transient feathered form. Each cupped receptacle of bird carries forward for the briefness of its life its tiny share of an astonishing ocean. The flow of blood that laps and ripples around the little coves and inlets of any single owl is part of something so much vaster. Owls function much like irrigation systems, their arrangements of organic channels, dams, and sluice gates are built to hold, to carry and pass on, the blood of what they are, corralling and communicating the essential life-water of their species, safely conveying it through time.

Locked into the labyrinth of life that we’ve named “long-eared owl” a liquid symphony is playing. Its notes have sounded out for longer than our species has been around to listen to it. Through a maze of arteries and veins that stretch their networks across millions of years, the intricate tube-work laid down upon the stepping stones of individuals, a kind of seriatim seabed, the life-flow of this species surges forward. It is in liquid that procreation happens. The eggs, white orbs in the untidy platform of the nest, are like elevated, independent rock pools, seemingly cut off from the tide that created them. They hold safe a portion of enchanted, life-filled water. Until new bodies gel, their hard shells enclose the brine that’s charged with the electricity whose voltage makes an owl. Distilled into the yolk and white is the seed that grows a bird. The bone and flesh and feather that emerge are like flexible eggshell, living porcelain that serves to dam and channel and transmit the vital fluid of Asio otus.

Liquid is hard to get hold of, it flows away. Cup your hands and you may catch some for a moment, but it soon escapes. This characteristic fits my new way of seeing owls. The interplay that weaves each individual from, connects it to, the species saga, the way each momentary sighting bears witness to a storyline of aeons, the complexity of microscopic processes unfolding in exquisite balance behind the blindfold of the feathers, the ancientness of brain and nerve and pumping heart—such a picture behaves like quicksilver, there for a moment of realization in the mind’s eye, then gone again. But it leaves behind, gleaming like a rivulet, the awareness that owl blood has flowed for stellar distances when each circuit around every bird is measured, mile after mile contained within the intimate architecture of the numerous bodies that constitute a kind of living odometer for Asio otus. Somewhere in the world right now, this moment, as your eyes touch this sentence, owl blood is being pumped around the network of thousands of owl bodies, as it has been pumped for centuries and will be for centuries to come. Each drop echoes to the throb and thrum of larger processes, an airborne ocean; waves that sit in trees; lethal tsunamis that fall out of the dark, engulfing and absorbing the pooled bodies of their prey.

It’s easier with words to focus on static singularities and give the kind of descriptions that a field guide would, focusing on plumage, habitat, behavior, noting the size and color of the eggs, incubation time and such like details. It’s much harder to capture owls’ real dimensions. How could a sentence hold something of this scale and intricacy? How could words be cast so that they convey what lies beyond the simple immediacies of perception? And yet words are not as helpless for giving a liquid view of owls as they might at first appear. Thinking of the way the pen I use touches the page and draws the ink out into the shape of my sentences, there’s an unexpected parallel with owls. Just as I’m tapping into the reservoir of language for a clutch of words to contain my meanings, so the individual birds function like owl-pens, drawing out the bead of their existence across the pages of being, channelling from the reservoir of owl the trickle that they need to power their single lives. Each life holds in suspension for its short span a segment of an ancient bloodline, provides a stretch of living piping that allows it to flow incrementally forward, life by life, via the stepping stones of individuals, into unfurling time. As meaning flows through the careful irrigation systems we build with sentences upon a page, so the life-liquid of owls flows, controlled and channelled and contained, through the domain of every bird.

A treasured relic from my owl-watching boyhood sits on the desk beside me as I write this essay. It’s a long-eared owl’s skull. I took it from a bird that I found shot, its bloodied body lying with a dozen or so crows and a scattering of pigeons and smaller birds. Men from a village near one of the woods where I watched owls sometimes came out after dark with pump-action shotguns and fired round after round into the trees where they thought the crows—which they considered vermin—were roosting. Their indiscriminate shooting caught any species that happened to be in the same vicinity. The owl was badly damaged. I kept some feathers for a while and carefully cleaned the skull. It’s paper-thin, almost translucent, like the finest bone china. Looking at the huge eye-sockets I can picture the orange-rimmed eyes that used to fill them. Touching the hooked beak, the tip still sharp, there’s an echo of the violence hard-wired into this remnant. But what strikes me most is an imagined sound. The skull is like a kind of seashell found in my beachcombing of that wood’s leaf-littered strand. Without even having to lift it to my ear, I can hear the sea in its little echo chamber—not the Atlantic or Pacific but the Ocean of the Owl, the wash of blood, synovial fluid, humours of the eye, saliva, digestive juices, sperm, hormones, mucous. Sometimes I think this empty skull contains an invisible whirlpool. The bone that dams and contains it is perilously thin, porous, liable to fracture. This has led to a kind of corrosive—but I hope creative—leakage that erodes old certainties, old ways of seeing. The truth is that my liquid view of owls has seeped into my imagination. I can feel it changing the way I think about a whole ream of other creatures, myself included.

 

 

Chris ArthurChris Arthur is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow and author of seven essay collections. He’s based in St Andrews, Scotland. For details of his writing see www.chrisarthur.org.

Read “Images of Hollow Hill” by Chris Arthur, also appearing in Terrain.org.

Header photo of long-eared owl by Mark Bridger, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Chris Arthur by Lucy Arthur.