The secret life of the heart-faced killer
NATURE OWL SENSE by Miriam Darlington (Faber £15.99) BEL MOONEY
whEN Miriam Darlington becomes obsessed by a wild creature, she does nothing by halves.
her 2012 book otter Country saw her ‘ wading through marshes, hiding between mossy rocks, paddling down rivers and swimming in sea lochs’ in search of wild otters.
Now, she has turned her questing attention to owls.
Each chapter presents a search for one of eight different species: barn, tawny, little, long-eared, short-eared, pygmy, snowy, and Eurasian eagle owl.
Darlington volunteers with The Barn owl Trust, meets experts and conservationists and travels to Serbia and France to tick off her owls.
Along the way, her family is afflicted by the bombshell of her teenage son’s mysterious and terrifying seizures — and it’s clear that Darlington has to counter a measure of motherly guilt in order to continue with her book.
It’s impossible not to feel intense sympathy here — as well as with her melancholy refrain about the loss of habitats and the depredations of humankind.
humans, of course, have long mistrusted owls, seeing them (among other things) as portents of evil. Anyone who has lain awake at night in the country and heard the haunting sound of an owl is immediately in touch with the most primitive side of the human spirit.
Darlington is good on literature (as you’d expect, since she is a poet) and folk belief, giving us plenty of stories and scientific owl lore.
For example, the barn owl is a ‘heart-faced killer’ whose hissing youngsters, ‘unattractive babies that only a mother could love’, have been known to ‘devour their weaker, more recently hatched siblings, swallowing them down whole’.
her field notes are excellent. I had no idea that the barn owl is using its distinctive heartshaped white face (so ghostly in the dark) to enable it to hunt. Its facial disc acts like a sound scanner to ‘ capture
sound waves and transport the faintest of whispers to the asymmetrical ears’.
The owl’s hearing is so accurate it should be called ‘ earsight’. Darlington concludes: ‘It is not surprising that the owl once developed a reputation for possessing a dark side; its skills must have seemed skin-creepingly powerful. [But] the ignorance has been replaced by a little more understanding.’
On a lighter note, Darlington offers rare moments of comedy. For example, on a birdwatching trip to the yearly owl festival in the Serbian town Kikinda, she unwittingly disturbs ( with an accidental camera flash) a whole roost of long-eared owls and slinks back to her ‘stony-faced’ group.
She had committed the ‘ultimate infringement’ — disturbing the owls — and you feel her acute embarrassment. Darlington is a fine writer and assiduous researcher. Owl Sense scores highest where she manages to combine facts about owls of all shapes and sizes with a lyrical appreciation of the meaning of the mythic power of these birds.
And, in comparing attitudes to wildlife in different countries, she notes that the French equivalent of the RSPB has only 45,000 members (in contrast to more than a million in Britain), that the French like to kill wildlife and that, in France, no bird-lover dares leave a bird book on the seat of a car or else the tyres would be slashed.
Bird slaughter is also rife in Eastern Europe, Greece, Italy and Malta — 25 million birds a year.
British people would have no sympathy with that unsentimental truth, so vive la difference!