What is it like to be an owl?

Science is laying bare the secrets of animals’ minds, from bats with grudges to prison-break turtles

This year marks the 50th anniversary of a famous thought experiment. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” asked the American philosopher Thomas Nagel in a punchy, provocative paper of the same title, which has gone on to be one of the most cited and disputed articles in consciousness studies. Any reader hoping for an answer to Nagel’s central question was to be disappointed. For Nagel’s conclusion was that while humans might try to imagine what it would be like “to behave as a bat behaves” – catching moths on the wing using sonar, say, or roosting upside down – they would still be unable “to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat”. Subjectivity is specific to the species, even down to individual experience – and therefore untranslatable.

In the half-century since Nagel posed his question, however, astonishing steps have been made in the science of animal studies. We are now vastly more informed about the perceptual worlds of the creatures with whom we share this miraculous, fragile planet.

We know, for instance, that bats not only echo-locate, but also speak and sing – with father bats teaching regionally specific songs to their sons. We know that mother bats teach their babies to vocalise by babbling at them, much as we human parents coo and murmur at our own young children. Vampire bats, like us, go quiet when they’re ill, and socially distance themselves from other bats beyond their family circles. Research by a team at Ohio State University suggests that bats can not only identify other individual bats, but can also remember favours and hold grudges. Each year, we discover more about just how little we know of bats – and how much like bats we humans are.

The life-world of moths, the bat’s favourite prey, has also opened up to us. It’s now understood that many moth species have ears that can hear bursts of bat sonar, and take evasive action (darts, dives, loops) when they do so, as a fighter pilot might seek to shake the bogey on his tail. Tiger moths go a step further, producing ultrasonic clicks that interfere with the bat’s sonar, as a fighter pilot tries to jam the radar of an enemy.

Bats are not the only denizens of the dark whose enigmatic lives are becoming more legible to us. If you are ever lucky enough to watch an owl, you will notice that while perched it will often bob its head in a dance-like fashion. This is the owl performing triangulation, also known as “motion parallax”: because its eyes are fixed in its head, it has to repeatedly shift its visual perspective in order to determine distance and position accurately. And what eyes they are! Our everyday tawny owl has, for my money, among the most striking eyes in the animal kingdom. I once watched a big tawny sitting in a hole in an old oak. Those eyes amazed me with their size and sheer, liquid darkness. They’re wells of ink, shafts of oil: two boreholes drilling right down into night.

The eye-size is, of course, a function of their nocturnal habits. Owls’ eyes thirstily drink in all available light; the moonlight in a thick wood, even the streetlamp-glow in a city park. Their corneas and pupils are proportionally overlarge, and their retinas have an abundance of highly light- and motion-sensitive “rod” cells. The number of rod cells comes at a cost to the number of colour-reactive “cone” cells, which means that most owls see either in monochrome or a very limited palette. No matter – for they have a second super-sense in the form of their hearing. Owls live in the roar on the

other side of silence. They hear noise glistening from every angle, glittering in every nook. Their ears turn darkness into day, landscape into book. They can hear the scutter of a vole through grass at a hundred yards. Owl hearing is so sensitive, in fact, that prolonged rain can starve them. Unable acoustically to distinguish anything other than the clatter of the downpour – the deafening sizzle of a thousand raindrops hitting a thousand leaves – they cannot hunt.

Owl hearing is arguably more miraculous and certainly less well understood than owl sight. Owls’ ears are set asymmetrically upon their head, the better to allow pinpointing of objects. The discs of feathers around their eyes are, as it were, translucent to sound, allowing owls to hear through their faces as well as their ears. Fascinating recent research has determined that, as the science writer Jennifer Ackerman explains it, “part of the hearing nerve that goes to the brain branches off to the owl’s optical centre as well”. We might reasonably say that owls “hear seeingly”.

Owls are, of course, stealth hunters, who fly in near-perfect silence. This is a function of their intricate wing structure, which aeroacoustic researchers have discovered to be unique to them. Studying owls’ flight feathers under microscopes, they found a combination of flexible bristles on the leading edge of a wing with an elastic, porous feather-fringe on the trailing edge: together, these work exquisitely to dissipate the sound of air’s passage over the wing, allowing owls to hush over rushes, through woodland, across marshes.

A stream of books has recently been taking the secret conversations, super-senses and hidden realms of the more-than-human world as their subject, among them Ackerman’s What an Owl Knows, Ed Yong’s An Immense World, Karen Bakker’s The Sounds of Life and Eva Meijer’s Animal Languages. All are eye-widening reads.

As Yong puts it: “When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens.” I firmly agree, and I would add that this is moral work, too. These revelations about the strangeness and diversity of the animal sensorium are humbling reminders of the limits of our own perceptions as a species – and of the responsibilities we bear to this “immense world”.

I am part of a group of lawyers, writers, artists and activists known as the Moth, or More Than Human Rights Project, based out of New York University: an initiative committed to advancing the wellbeing of humans, more-thanhumans and the web of life that sustains us all.

Moths are one of our icons: on fieldwork in the cloud forests of Ecuador, three of us encountered a huge moth with yellow and red wings, plush as nubuck, upon which were marked two huge black eye-like circles. It was an unnamed species of the Automeris genus, and this gorgeous creature – the moth who looks back at you – became a symbol for our endeavour of broadening interspecies perception.

Literature is not the only place in which the songs, speech and stories of animals, insects and fungi are being heard. Music, too: the musician Cosmo Sheldrake makes intricate use of the polyphonic sound-worlds of nature. His 2020 album Wake Up Calls was constructed using recordings of birdsong Sheldrake had gathered over nine years, from the electric churr of nightjars to the silver trill of nightingales and the foghorn-boom of the bittern. On last year’s Wild Wet World, Sheldrake dived into the ocean, folding in field recordings of humpback-whale song, the courting cries of Weddell seals and the benthic clicks of sperm whales.

Eighteen months ago, I began work on a suite of songs called Night Creatures, intended to honour the mysterious lives of nocturnal animals. My collaborators in this were the South Indian writer and naturalist Yuvan Aves, and the remarkable Howl, a nine-voice vocal ensemble based in London. I wrote three lyric poems, each dedicated to a night creature: the glowworm, the tawny owl and the moth. Then, Aves and I wrote a ghazal – a long-lined praise-poem in couplets – for the Olive Ridley sea turtle, which comes ashore in darkness to dig a sandy pit in which to lay its hundred or so ping-pong-ball eggs, before slipping back off into the black ink of the deep ocean.

Heloise Tunstall-Behrens and Lydia Samuel, both of Howl, set our lyrics to music to be sung by the choir. In Fallen Sun, our glowworm song, individual voices bud and pop in the darkness, lighting up and shutting off in rapid rhythm. Our Mad Owl Love Song dreams of tawnies “singing each to each, wilder and wilder” as a night wind grows and shifts the old oak, the old ash and the old beech. In Moth, all nine voices flock, swoop and swirl, building in intensity and density.

We wanted to draw the listener deeper into the wonder of these creatures, and to throw light upon the dangers these beings face in the unfolding ecological crises of today. We wanted to make songs that are both joyful and haunting.

Each of our chosen creatures is differently miraculous and differently threatened. Female glowworms climb to the summit of grass-blades and there illumine their abdomens with the help of the diabolically named enzyme luciferase, which emits a cold yellowishgreen light.

Sea turtles navigate the currents of vast ocean depths by reading the Earth’s geomagnetic field as easily as you or I might consult a road atlas. Their cartographic skills are so acute that pregnant adult females can find their way back to the precise stretch of nesting beach on which they themselves were born, years previously. New research has even disclosed that turtles communicate with one another while still inside the egg, allowing them to synchronise their hatchings, like prisoners tapping on the pipes to co-ordinate a break-out.

As the late scientist Karen Bakker put it, what scientists call “digital listening” – the combination of AI analysis with acoustic technology – is now so advanced that it “can home in on specific sounds that matter most to turtles”. It allows us to listen “not only to turtles, but also like turtles”: tuning our ears to the danger-sound of feeding piranhas, for instance, or the murmurings of (tasty) tadpole shrimp, whose sounds lie outside the range of unaugmented human hearing.

Here, we are truly beginning to approach an answer to Nagel’s question. Through science and art, we are at last beginning to learn how to listen in to our more-thanhuman kin. The hard question now is what we do with what we hear.

The discs of feathers around their eyes allow owls to hear through their faces

Howl and Robert Macfarlane will perform Night Creatures at Kings Place, London N1 (kingsplace.co.uk), next Sat; to pre-order the album, go to: howlsingers.bandcamp.com