‘I’ll just get that,’ said Pete, diving in with some kitchen roll to clean up the owl faeces. ‘Ooh, who’s THIS then?’ I asked, gesturing at the great grey owl a few feet away, but Pete’s head was dipped and he assumed I was referring to a tall pensioner in front of me. ‘This is Alby,’ Pete answered. ‘He’s our chairman.’ I’m not the kind of person who’d say ‘Ooh, who’s THIS then?’ to open a conversation with a stranger in his early seventies, but it was novel to be briefly mistaken for one. ‘Hello,’ said Alby. ‘I don’t have my owl with me today because I’m undergoing chemotherapy and cannot afford to get scratched.’ Behind him, an African spotted eagle owl baited excitably at a ringtone of the opening riff from the Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’. I’d been at owl club all of two minutes and already there was drama everywhere. A rumour circulated that, soon, flapjacks were to be served.
Owl club – or Torbay Owls and Company, as it’s more formally known – is a splinter owl club from a bigger owl club. ‘We started our own because there was lots of backbiting at the other one,’ I was told by Norman, who with his wife Jan owns two other owls in addition to Ellie the African spotted eagle owl. Alby reassured prospective members of owl club that they wouldn’t get ‘any of that “My owl’s better than your owl” stuff here’. These possible members included Jamie, who’d brought his European eagle owl Boo along to owl club. Although only eight weeks old, Boo already weighed sixteen pounds and would eventually grow to twice her size. That is, if she did turn out to be a she. Many owls, I was informed, are ‘very hard to sex’ when they’re young, although one man sitting near me said he could do it with a 95 per cent success rate using magnets. Something made me stop short of asking how.
Not everyone at owl club had brought their owls with them. Some had just come for owl advice. This was given by Alby and included ‘Never approach an owl from behind,’ the dangers of being ‘footed’ by an owl and food tips such as ‘Always have a plastic bag with you in case you see a car hit a pheasant.’ Alby explained he had been on steroids recently, which made him ‘feel like he could break into Paignton Zoo and feed the lions by hand’. He stopped short of demonstrating, but produced some large frozen rats from a cool box to feed to tonight’s owls. Authoritatively, he explained how to tie a falconer’s knot – ‘my way, the good way, not the way you see on YouTube’ – and that stroking an owl’s back feathers is bad, as it removes the natural oil from them.
I was reassured that all the owls of owl club lived in spacious aviaries in the Torbay area, but I decided that my visit to owl club would be a one-off and that the owls I observed in future would be wild ones. Plenty of these were available in the trees beyond my garden, after all. ‘Are there any owls around?’ I would sometimes say to these wild owls and, usually within under a minute, one would reply in the affirmative. Contrary to what a lot of people will have you believe, no self-respecting individual owl actually says,‘T’wit t’woo.’ It is a statement that, to be delivered with authenticity, requires two owls. The high-pitched female tawnies say, ‘T’wit’ – which is really more like ‘Toooo-WEEEEEET’ – and the more bassy and insouciant male tawnies answer, if they’re in the mood, with ‘T’woo.’ The spinney immediately to the west of my house seems to be very female-dominated, sometimes apparently stiflingly so for its residents. Several lady tawnies will screech in the early hours, kind of casually at first, then with a growing hen-party intensity, until finally after an hour or so a lothario manowl will chime in with a low-key yet confident ‘Woo’ like the Owl Fonz quietly entering a room full of leather-clad rock and roll girls. ‘Do not panic,’ Owl Fonz appears to be saying at these junctures. ‘As you will soon discover, there is more than enough of me to go around.’ The owls here are especially vocal in early spring and early autumn, but they’re tough-nut all-year-rounders, like the jackdaws and the gulls. The most eager of the seasonal birds to get to work are the greater spotted woodpeckers, in late January. The sound these make is uncannily similar to the one the creaky wooden gate to my garden makes upon being opened by my postman. Ooh, I have mail, I will sometimes think, when in reality I just have woodpecker.
It was once popularly believed that woodpeckers were bad for trees. In fact, the work they do is another kind of tree-hugging, their true agenda being not destruction but to contribute to arboreal health: they bore into decaying timber, feeding on the grubs of bark-munching beetles. In this way they are the antithesis of grey squirrels, whose cuddling of trees masks a true agenda of rampant nihilism. Dave has had terrible trouble with the greys at Dartington, who have chronically weakened many of his beeches and sycamores. ‘A lot of it is about sexual frustration,’ he told me. ‘The male squirrels get horny, and they can’t find a mate, so they attack some bark.’ Everyone I know who regularly walks in the Dartington area seems to have had a horny squirrel trash-talk to them at some point. It is a shocking noise when you first hear it coming from the branches of a nearby tree: birdlike, but tongue-flicking and not at all fluffy. I am sure one of the grey’s smaller, less destructive red counterparts would never be so uncouth. October to
