It is mid-May and I am sitting on a fallen tree in a wood, alone, squinting into the fast-fading light. Midges are nipping at my face and hairline. I want to pull up my hood to stop them biting my scalp but I don’t want to cover my ears. Under the cover of the beeches and oaks it is almost entirely dark now, a kind of false, early tree-night.
I am waiting for owlets. Tawny owlets. I am sure that if I wait just a few minutes longer, I will hear their strange, raspy call – skeee skeee skeee – to tell me where they are. I know they are here, somewhere in the trees, because my partner and I have been watching them on and off for two weeks now, after a chance encounter one afternoon.
It seems foolish to be sitting out here letting midges feast on me, in the hope of making myself a mild annoyance to some other living creatures in turn, and I’m getting tired. Soon, I won’t be able to see my footing on the way home.
Earlier, ambling up the road by twilight, I had passed a couple drinking wine outside their holiday home and overheard them exclaim how strange it was for anyone to be walking at this hour. Not here, I thought, where it is entirely normal for people to walk at all times of day and night, seeking stars or dawn cloud inversions, northern lights or northern sunsets. But this evening I am the only human in this wood.
The appeal of owls
I have been fascinated with owls since childhood. Growing up in suburban Nottingham, we occasionally had a tawny owl roosting in the tall trees around our 1950s house that were the remnants of much earlier, grander gardens. When I first moved to Grasmere in the Lake District, I lived in an attic room and was delighted to find I could hear tawny owls calling at night when I lay there, tucked into the eaves.
Even so, I did not see one close-up until the summer solstice of 2017, when the long, midsummer light meant our evening walk coincided with the owl’s hunt. Over the past few years, a compounding of coincidences has meant we see them often.
I am chronically ill, disabled by a pair of unrelated but overlapping systemic genetic conditions that both cause pain and fatigue, and come with an ever-growing entourage of co-morbidities. My symptoms often keep me up at night. Listening to the owls hooting around my cottage, it is comforting to know I am not alone in my wakefulness. Though walking is helpful for the long-term management of some of my symptoms, it aggravates others. I take short, familiar walks in places I know will bring variety to my day in the form of my non-human neighbours: herons and frogs in the tarn, red squirrels, deer, a rotating cast of songbirds.
Once I knew this community might include owls, my favourite route was fixed. And so it was that in May 2023 my partner and I happened to be making our usual circuit through the trees at the precise moment three tawny owlets were contemplating launching themselves into the wider world from the platform of their nestbox.
Owlet encounters
I have almost convinced myself to get up and leave when I hear it, faintly, further along the path, the lamenting cry of a hungry owlet. Skeee skeeeeeeee. “Will I ever be fed?” it seems to say. “Does no one care for me?” I care, of course, but I have no fresh voles to offer.
I follow the sound and scan the trees. There, midway on a long birch branch, is a little wavery splot of not-tree in the near dark: the glowing grey outline of a tawny owlet. This one is quiet as a stone, its head bobbing as it tries to work me out. In a neighbouring tree, its two siblings are shouting for their dinner, although by the time I spot them it is so dark that my eyes register them only as blurred patches of textured dark. If I hadn’t known they were there, I could have walked right past them, never have imagined they were just feet away from me, blending into the night. They have moved deep into the wilds of the woody common, away from the path and human intrusion.
The next day is bright and dry, the cold wind less cold. I take an earlier walk while my partner is at work, hoping to see the owlets in better light now I have a sense of where they are. I can’t see them from the path, though I think I can hear one further up the slope. I climb a little higher, above the spot I saw them last. Instead of an owlet, I startle a parent owl from a tall tree, and it leads me higher up the slope. Just as I lose the first adult in the canopy, its mate flies past, coming from the other direction and leading me even further away. I see what they are doing and I can’t fault them for it. By the time I lose sight of both parents I am far from their vulnerable, grounded babies.
My partner and I return at dusk and find the owlets near where they were the night before, all three together. They are restless and fidgety, as they always seem to be when they are waiting for dinner, hopping from tree to tree, stretching their long white legs and their browning wings. The eldest casually spreads its wings and flies to a tree further up the hill. This is the first time we have seen any of them fly, rather than leap and flap.
In the twilight the owlets look so ghostly, so immaterial, until they move and phase from haze into solid bodies. It is as though they are moving through dimensions when they leap, in and out of this reality and another. I understand, when I see them like this, so uncannily not quite material, why they have been considered otherworldly.
Tawny owls have long been associated with death – with graveyards, and with all things sinister and spooky. The call of a tawny owl is often used in films and TV shows to indicate that a scene is taking place after dark. But, to me, there is nothing deathly or scary about these birds. They are chirpy, comical and endearing. Utterly lovable. The only haunting thing is our continued failure to perceive them, to hear them for what they are.
As spring rolls into summer, we lose sight of the owlets when the bracken grows too high for us to pass along the small paths that lead to where they have settled. At the end of August we spot one of them right on the edge of their childhood territory, almost indistinguishable from the adults, apart from a slight hazy, unfinished look.
Observing owls
One of the first things I learned when I determined to find out more about tawny owls is that not that much is known about them. There is a prevailing belief that they are hard to observe and monitor, even though they are the most common owl in the UK, with estimates of anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000 breeding pairs.
Because they are so common, they are well-represented in wildlife sanctuaries and rescue centres and, indeed, in the homes of people who rescue ill and injured birds. There are even several memoirs written by people who have raised or rehabilitated a tawny owl. This may not be the same as observing one in the wild but such experiences can still tell us a lot about the species’ habits, routines and character.
Observing the tawny trio in the wild, I learned how they respond to and care for each other. I loved to see how the siblings protected each other as soon as they were able, and would snuggle up, preening each others’ feathers. They defied all my expectations.
I still have so much more to discover but this is what I have learned so far about tawny owls that has surprised me. They love to sunbathe, and there is evidence that they need sunlight to make vitamin D, just as we do. They like access to fresh water for bathing – which they do often, flapping their wings in the water and splashing it over their bodies. It helps shed their downy baby coats. All water is not good, though – rain limits their ability to hunt, as it does with barn owls.
Tawny owls mate for life but a mated pair do not live together all year round. Partners come together at nesting season, then live apart for months. Each time they reunite, the male presents his partner with a home he has prepared, which she rejects if it doesn’t meet her exacting standards. Their ensuing chicks are born blind, like kittens. For the first week or 10 days of their lives the mother rips up food with her beak and waves it over theirs so they can feel it.
Owls have exceptionally large eyes, with an exceptionally large number of rods within them, which help form a high-resolution image in their brain. They cannot rotate them in their eye sockets like we can though, which is why they need to be able to turn their heads so far. The special construction of their eyes also makes them more sensitive to bright light and to light pollution – as they are to noise pollution with their acute hearing.
There are also things I have learned about myself because of learning about the owls. Like a tawny owl, I am a night creature that nonetheless loves the sun. I too relish a good bath, and am sensitive to light, noise and disturbance. I am deeply attached to my home territory, and I need to be alone as much as I need companionship. Living with chronic illness can be a particular kind of loneliness, a separateness that, for me, was compounded by the pandemic. Spending time with the owls has made me feel less lonely, made me think again about different kinds of togetherness, different kinds of understanding.
Living with energy-limiting illness and pain mediates my relationship with the natural world and with the landscape. I cannot always walk up the road to where the owls live, and I cannot stand or sit for very long watching for them. But I am so lucky that I get to see them so often – and even if I don’t, just to know they are out there, living their best owl lives, is enough
More amazing wildlife stories from around the world
- Lost-long ‘singing’ insect returns to Britain after vanishing three decades ago
- "Incredibly emotional": moving footage shows orphaned gorillas returning to wild after 10 years of rehabilitation
- Smallest otter in the world rediscovered in Nepal after 185-year absence
- Coastal wolf found dead in lair on Alaskan island – dissection reveals curious thing that caused it
Main image: a tawny owl perched in a tree. Credit: Getty