When to stuff an owl’s foot under your armpit!
WHEN J. K. Rowling was seeking a charismatic, magical companion for Harry Potter, she chose Hedwig, a snowy owl. As John LewisStempel says in this delightful little book: ‘There is something about owls.’
We humans have been fascinated by them for millennia. The earliest depiction of an owl is a carving in a cave in the Ardeche in France. It dates back 30,000 years.
Sometimes we are fearful of them. The owl has long been seen, in various cultures, as a harbinger of death. In North America, the Apache reckoned that if you dreamed of one, you were not long for this world.
One Welsh name for the owl is Aderyn Corff — which translates as ‘ corpse bird’. Meanwhile, in Ancient Rome it was thought that witches could turn themselves into owls and suck the blood of sleeping babies.
The bird, of course, is also a symbol of wisdom and sobriety (although the phrase ‘as drunk as a boiled owl’ was once popular). As late as the 19th century, there was a belief that eating owls’ eggs prevented drunkenness. In fact, over the centuries, a whole series of weird beliefs about the curative powers of owls has developed.
In pre-modern Germany, if you were bitten by a rabid dog the ideal way to avoid the consequences was to stuff the heart and right foot of an owl under your left armpit.
It may have inspired fear and unorthodox medical treatments, but we’ve also long thought well of the owl. It’s a favourite in the nursery, easily anthropomorphised — like Wol in the Winnie-the-Pooh books — or turned into a fluffy toy.
Florence Nightingale had a much-loved pet owl called Athena, which she carried around in her pocket. When it died in 1855, she delayed her departure to the Crimea in order to have it preserved for posterity.
Athena, expertly embalmed, can still be seen at the Florence Nightingale Museum in St Thomas’ Hospital, London.
The creatures are certainly remarkable, as Lewis-Stempel makes clear. A long-eared owl can see a mouse in a light level equivalent to one candle in a football stadium. Some can swivel their heads through 270 degrees. (The best a human can manage, if exceptionally flexible, is 180 degrees.)
This may have given rise to the Ancient Greek notion that the long-eared owl was so stupid it would wring its own neck by following the movement of somebody walking around it.
In Britain, we have five species that breed here, together with occasional visitors. The short-eared owl, the barn owl, the tawny owl and the long-eared owl are longterm residents, while the little owl was an import from continental Europe, introduced into Britain in the 19th century.
All add to the beauty of our countryside and deserve celebrating — and LewisStempel, author of The Running Hare and prizewinning Meadowland, has done just that in this brilliantly quirky compilation.