A miracle in the Norfolk skies
The upland prairie of this week’s walk is the winter territory of several birds of prey, such as peregrine, kestrel, buzzard and hen harrier. But let’s have a look at the most recent arrival which is the shorteared owl mentioned in this week’s walk. It has very long wings and staring yellow eyes that seem to go right through you if you are lucky enough to be close. This dayflying owl comes down from Scotland to Sussex in autumn and spends the winter on the Downs. It was called Norwegian owl and Woodcock owl by Sussex country folk a century ago. In other districts it was mousehawk, short-horned howlet, and horned hoolert.
I have had many close encounters with this strange and very beautiful bird and so had my father when he lived in Norfolk in the war. In fact his encounter was so weird that he wrote about the moment of contact in one of his novels. It happened like this. He had gone for a walk along the seashore at Blakeney Point. If you don’t know those marshes and nature reserve as a bird watcher’s paradise, holiday retreat, or sailor enjoying its inshore estuary you ought to go when conditions allow.
It was late November when father walked the shores. There had been a full moon and a massive migration of birds overnight which had reached the shingle strand above the high tide mark. He saw hundreds of robins crouched exhausted on the pebbles, together with blackbirds, redwings, fieldfares and woodcock. Many of the weaker birds must have drowned in passage, or perhaps lucky ones had settled on the decks of passing boats.
Then he saw an owl. The bird was huddled in the marram grass on the dunes. Its eyes were closed. Creeping closer he noticed something very strange. The owl had another bird clinging to its back. It was very small, and of a greyish green colour but with a distinct yellow mark on its head. Yes, it was a goldcrest, the smallest British bird.
He concluded that the minute traveller had fallen out of the sky due to exhaustion and has landed on the back of the owl where it clung into the warmth and was miraculously saved from certain death. These very tiny birds are seriously challenged thermally and I myself saw one at Kingley Vale one cold winter day fall dead as it flew over a meadow.
In his book The Phasian Brid, a story about a rare Reeves pheasant, father describes what may have been the outcome of the strange encounter between two exhausted birds.
‘Falling tired, on moth-like wings it had chanced to drop upon the back of the owl, had clenched its feet upon soft feathers, and sunk to sleep while the larger bird beat long wings in slow soft journey over the fretted wave-tops. There in its warm roost the goldcrest slept till sunrise, when with a minute cry of alarm it saw the yellow ringed eyes of the owl in the head turned sharply to stare down its own back, fixed upon it. With a feeble cry it flitted away and hid in the grasses, while the owl flapped into the air and flew on hollow, sedge-sere wings in quest of mice in the fields beyond the marshes.’
While we sleep easy in our beds, many such mishaps are happening on migration in the night skies around us that we can barely imagine.