saving owl...
and other feathered kerfuffles.
Hello to every lovely one of you!
Lordy, I will never get used to a cold snap in May—I really should!
In France there s a saying I’ve heard often said by the old gardeners; “Attention, le premier des saintes de glace, souvent tu en gardes la trace.” meaning “Watch out—the first of the Ice Saints often leaves a lasting impression.” There are five of them of these not so saintly saints, Mamert, Pancrace, Servais et Boniface and Sainte-Sophie who was supposed to scuttle off last night, I wish she’d hurry up and melt because it’s probably not terribly holy to curse a Saint…
I am thoroughly ruffled, cursed saints aside, the last trimester of the year begins in a flurry of feathers that use up my already precious little time in a way I least expect. Never mind that the spring break is over, that everything I had planned to achieve, for once—amazingly—actually was, never mind that I was organised even down to anticipating the usual clothes-crisis after two weeks looking like a hillbilly—can I use that word? I mean it in the nicest possible way because really, look who’s talking here wearing patched dungarees over a favourite old t-shirt and battered Doc Martens. Never mind that meals are prepared for the next two days and I remembered to fill the car with fuel and had the money to pay for it even though the price is as terrifying as the cause.. Never mind that I was up on time and I didn’t have to race after the bus to the next stop because for once I wasn’t too late for the first!
Never mind that literally everything is tickety-boo!
But that calling coming from the barn… a calling I know so well, hasn’t stopped and it should have.
At the end of the our huge stone barn, where the roof is teetering, ready to fall in—or fly away in the arms of a storm—this noise that shouldn’t be has feathers shaped like an owl, or two… or three… and when I go to feed the hens, there, too, a noise in the coop which shouldn’t be… and what is that kerfuffle of squawking going on in the corner of the woodland?
I wonder if someone is playing a joke…
Thus the first week back in classes begins.
For real, no joke!
Here, we don’t touch the meridian far enough north to know dawn at any extraordinarily early hour, except on those last few days before mid-summer when daylight hangs languorously across the horizon hesitant to leave.
Meaning, often there are still stars sleepily scattered in the ink when I wake.
I like this, I like to watch the end of the night, just as I like to watch the beginning.
Recently I have watched every constellation and planet shifting above me while I listen to an owlet’s famished calling for a mother that doesn’t arrive, night after night after night…
On repeat. She, the last of three, is still there.
Monday night, I gaze from my window into the infinite deep indigo of a clear sky, Hercules appears, balances on my barn roof, then climbs over and up to disappear into the west. Two dying stars fall and disappear into the inky blue. I watch all this while thinking I should be dreaming big, sweet dreams.
But, I can hear a noise in the barn.
Owl — a telltale clicking, a tiny beak-warning, a shuffle of fluff over dusty floorboards at the end of the barn. I find only one owlet, though likely there is another. I try to approach but it seems I have been warned!
For the second time in as many weeks.
Love overcomes fatigue,
Tawny Owls have reared their young in our barn for all the years I have lived here. A fact that is not surprising when I read that an owl will return to the same nest year after year, as will her offspring.
Meaning, generation after generation of owls have reared their young in the dust and the debris at the end of our barn, which is quite something.
Owls… generations of them, wow! No really, just wow! I feel honoured. I think I always will.
I listen, quietly gazing into the night sky waiting, hoping to see a silent, winged-shadow swoop into the opening. She doesn’t arrive. Okay… so hunting is a tough job. Tonight, evidently, tougher than most and that’s not just one owlet I hear calling.
I close the window, send a silent prayer to both hunter and hunted, try to sleep through the hungry screeches.
In the morning they are still calling. Their voices sound weaker… is that just a mother’s concerned instinct or really, for real, hunger calls?
Pyjama clad, torch in hand, I pad out to the barn. And, of course, the calling ceases.
“Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”
I pick my way through hubby’s stacks of timber, tools, scaffold poles, several cast iron radiators, half an ancient wine press—because you just never know when the other half will turn up—various piles of old iron, trip over the sails of a wind generator—because you never know when the pole to set them on will turn up—and find two owlets. Four wide eyes in fluff. One is almost ready to fly the other barely half its size. Both are cowering behind an old door propped on a wooden barrow filled with broken floor tiles and an old clock face—don’t ask. It would make a great photo but I don’t have my camera and its dark anyway—see what I mean David E. Perry, a BBB, as sure as eggs is eggs!
They both look healthy but they don’t look sleepy.
They should be sleepy; a well fed and happy owl will have its eyes closed not wide open staring at you as if you are about to say something very stupid, which, although I mean well, I do.
They don’t answer, not even a clicking of their beak is offered in return. I leave them to their dusty corner and hope my hunch is wrong.
When I return from classes in the evening they are still calling.
They sound weak.
When I go to check them they look weak, too weak.
Two bundles of fluff stare up at me with wise, sad eyes and though I don’t speak owl I know they are asking for food. It’s no longer a hunch.
All I need is several mice or a few new born chicks…
And so, because I am no match for either owl mother or kestrel mother in the secrets of hunting tiny wild creatures, chicken breast is removed from the fridge, warmed to what I consider might be just-slaughtered-mouse temperature then fed piece by shredded piece to a starving baby owl.
On repeat…
Meanwhile in the chicken coop it sounds like the sky has fallen in. There is not a buzzard in sight, no sign of a rusty fox tail, neither the musky scent of mustelid. Nevertheless a bloody-feathered conquest has taken place.
Anarchy in a chicken coop is worse than fox, wildcat or polecat, death is slow, intentionally so, and torturous. A bitter, often days long battle, until death.
Henpecking; a sort of chicken war with no explanation other than self election by one bolshy Mademoiselle as chief.
I look daggers at her, she throws yellow-eyed daggers back, hops from one foot to the other then walks away. Do I imagine the way she deliberately walks over the puddle of bloodied feathers, smirking at the cockerel, with her head high and tail-end wiggling?
Mr cockerel, still too young to mediate or notice a wiggling chicken bottom, is puffed up and pacing, trying out his crowing voice though Chanticleer “His voice was merrier than the merry organ that plays in church.” he is not.
“And with a cluck he them began to call, For he had found some corn within the yard. Regal he was, and fears he did discard.”
— Chaucer, from The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
Distracted by the bucket of feed I am carrying he fails to calm them, pecks at the grain with one eye on the terrorist, decides on departure to comfort my one surviving little brown hen, now cowering in a corner. Both wear a look of utter disbelief, they click and cluck together, unable to understand why new friends are attacking one another—my interpretation since I don’t speak chicken either.
Mademoiselle ignores both him and me, leaps, claws first onto the back of her poor victim, throws me another taunting look which I translate as ‘I dare you to try and stop me’ and sinks her beak into the back of an already bloody neck.
I dare…
It takes me longer than I’d like but eventually, the anarchist is caught and sentenced to two weeks quiet reflection on her misdemeanours in solitary confinement.
Meanwhile in my tiny patch of woodland where pink herb Robert is scandalised by the size of burdock leaves and shade from canopies of whispering leaves that were silent just days ago. Where the ravages of winters ice-picks and axes have been buried ceremoniously in cathedral walls of luminous greenery, heralding from the furthest corner where the great-grandmother Ash still stands tall and proud, there is another type of screeching going on.
A pair of Jay’s have made a nest in her sprawling branches.
Hidden entirely by the last remaining ivy, too dense and too high to peep into, babes have been calling incessantly and loudly through the entire chicken fiasco. I stand beneath the arched branches peering up, hoping their excitement is simply part of normal Jay baby characteristics, I whisper up to them;
“Sorry to wake you little ones, there was nothing I could do but the show is over, you can go back to sleep…
With forever feathered love
Something—other than a baby owl—I fell in love with this week;
Jaime Brandel writes as gently about tiny details as she captures them in her divine photographs.
This is tough, as nature often is... and I swallow hard and keep on reading... much appreciated!
This was such a magical Sunday morning read! Oh, how my mama heart wrenched reading about your tending to those baby owls, wishing them the same loving care you give to the chickens. Your reflections always make me wish I was there with you, tending to the earth and clock faces and eyes peering through darkness. Thank you for this beauty.