There are owls everywhere I look. Cut from felt and sewn onto cushions, plasticised and stuck on car windows, printed on clothes, curtains and lampshades, encased in children’s keyrings. Walk along any high street and they line up in the furniture and fashion stores, turning retailers into cartoon bird sanctuaries where hawk, eagle, tawny, barn, snowy and great grey owls mass behind the glass. There’s even one in the hospital. Between two blue fabric boards pinned with notices and leaflets, the local primary school has decorated a section of the Antenatal Clinic’s wall with cut-out animals. It’s an odd menagerie: tigers, elephants, lions, a giraffe, a fox, a red squirrel, a hedgehog, and then what looks to be a tawny owl. I say ‘looks’, because it is not much more than a splodge of brown and cream poster paint, but two wide, front-facing eyes give it away. Little hands have captured a subtlety that fashion designers and toy makers usually miss: an owl’s face is curiously human.
After tingling our hands with the gel dispenser at the door, Rosie gives her name to a lady at the desk. ‘Your twelve-week scan, is it, love?’ she asks. ‘Take a seat and someone will be with you soon.’
We sit on a line of smart, red chairs opposite the solitary owl as it stares out from the branches of its broccoli tree. Our fingers are entwined under the handbag in Rosie’s lap, wrists touching, pulses dancing in nervy excitement. She sips water occasionally, to try to quell the ebb and flow of morning sickness. For good reason the Antenatal Clinic is a long stretch from the tobacco fog of smokers at the entrance and the baked-goods and coffee smells of the hospital café. You have to follow a red line down numerous shimmering square corridors. Once inside, this ward seems softer than the rest of the hospital, lighter and more relaxed – all peaches and pine. This is the good end of the human journey, I suppose; a place where the body conforms to its predetermined trimesters and where pain has a purpose at least. And there are plenty of reminders of the prize if all goes well: posters to promote breastfeeding show happy mothers cradling cute babies; cherubic faces crawl across white pillows in adverts for local photography studios.
Had the clinic’s windows faced the outside world rather than an enclosed courtyard, we might have seen the bright, cold morning and its sky of plate-glass blue. Instead, the waiting area’s luminosity comes from wire-waffled squares of fluorescence in a tiled ceiling. Wooden toys stand on low tables by racks of tatty magazines that I’m apprehensive about touching. So we sit and look at the owl, stroking each other’s wrists with our thumbs and listening to the muffled beeps, buzzes and squeaks of shoes striding across disinfected vinyl.
The sonographer, Rachel, is pretty with hair tied back and wearing a fitted white tunic with blue bands about her arms. She carries a clipboard and a warm smile, but is clearly up against it. ‘Would you like to follow me, please?’
We do, to a small but bright room, just enough space for the equipment, a bed, sink, storage and the obligatory multicoloured bins with toxic warnings. It smells clean, surgical, like the hand gel at the door. Rosie lies on the freshly papered trolley bed and rolls up her top, as directed. Rachel turns a pole on the room’s Venetian blind, plunging us into dark, and seats herself at the ultrasound’s kidney-shaped plastic control board. With its big buttons, detachable bits and ergonomic curves it looks strangely childish, a Fisher-Price ‘My First Ultrasound’ toy. That is until it fires up and the screens come alive. Serious beeps and lights. Rachel takes control like a pilot at a console. She looks back at me as I stand nervously, holding our jackets and Rosie’s bag.
‘You might want to sit down.’
Yes. Take your seat. Relax. Prepare for the in-flight movie.
I hold Rosie’s hand as Rachel squirts a big circle of thick, bluish gel over her stomach. ‘Sorry it’s cold,’ she says as Rosie hoots. But it is excitement, not discomfort. From where she’s lying, she can’t see the monitors: Rachel has both of them turned towards her. I imagine this is in case of problems with the foetus; they spare the parents the emotional connection that would be forged by the act of laying eyes upon a life. But I’m tall and nosy so I lean back my chair and get the first views as the torch-like transducer probe nuzzles its way around my wife’s belly, ranging, listening.
Black and silver storm clouds tumble past, swelling and contracting like squeezed balloons. It takes a second for Rachel to locate the uterus, a throbbing mercurial ring, and then hover over the placenta. She operates the probe expertly, changing direction, clicking its sides and zooming in for a better view, closing on the blackness of the amniotic sac. What I see is even more black and silver circles extending, opening, parting and joining, making shapes. There are all sorts of landscapes forming from Rosie’s workings; we’re flying over the Lake District’s craggy northern fells, winter moors, domed Salisbury hills and above the moonlit Thames – all the places we’ve been together. She carries them inside her. Rosie is watching my face; I squeeze her hand and smile. Then, when I look back at the screen, the snowy pixels have arranged themselves again, forming, for a second, the distinct face of a tawny owl.
‘Well?’ Rosie whispers. ‘What can you see?’
You don’t usually find tawny owls (Strix aluco) in hospitals, although their habitats are changing. They like to roost in woods and the high crevices or branch cavities found in old, deciduous trees, like oak. In our endless skirmishes over land, woods continue to disappear and the felling of dead, hollowed trunks has seen a denuding of traditional nest sites. But being a year-round resident, tawnies hate to concede ground and the stability of their numbers in the UK is down to a willingness to take alternative accommodation in order to hold territory: purpose-built owl boxes; squirrel dreys; unattended crow, magpie or heron nests; even dilapidated buildings. As a student in Leeds I once heard a male calling from a windowless warehouse near a motorway on the long six-mile walk home from a party. Mostly they seem to love the abandoned places, the unmanaged islands where man has temporarily laid off interfering and allowed functional ecosystems to thrive – forests, cemeteries, churchyards and, almost always, edge-lands.
I’ve been watching a pair of owls down in the wood for weeks. About four weeks, to be precise. And it’s probably truer to say listening for rather than watching, as being nocturnal and soundless in flight, they’ve been almost impossible to see. No matter. Their calls sneaked inside me, lingering in my ears as doggedly as fag smoke used to hang about your clothes after a night in a pub. I first began hearing their duets in the wood when I was out looking for the fox. At times they were frightening, like the panicked, gurgled screams of shipwrecked sailors drifting in a black ocean; at others they were the cooing comfort-sounds made by a new mother. Each call carried the natural reverb of the river gorge, lending them a peculiar ‘Wall of Sound’ sonic resonance, like the harmony part on ‘Be My Baby’. Roomy. Spacey. And those shrill, terrifying shrieks and low, loving hoots kept me company at night, growing ever louder in my re-ordering world.
Horizons began to widen in early February. They always do. It is something about the lifting light and sky. Days no longer seem so abbreviated, in such a mad rush to reach their conclusion. Even in the architectural confines of central Harrogate one afternoon, I saw hundreds of high, hollow rectangular clouds stretching off indefinitely with the bumpy texture of old oak bark, filling the air with a psychedelic mauve. Look up, I wanted to say, but no one seemed to notice. People moved from shops and offices to cars bearing mobile phones or stood bored and smoking, playing Candy Crush as they waited for buses. The evening suggested limitless potential, so I walked home past a row of once-pollarded ash growing wild behind a high garden wall. Birds were on my mind already. Robins, wrens and blue tits were out of hiding and contesting territory with such fierce beauty that their calls drowned out the passing cars. Held in their brief tractor-beam of song, I tried to follow each bird’s movements as, every few seconds, one flashed up to the wooden mouldings of a Victorian gable, then dived back into the fray. The sky bled into a soft coral at the crossing point and the black, broomstick-tips of trees along the old railway fanned like capillaries of the heart against it. It was an unearthly window, that changing of the guard – cold, clear day to bitter, black night.
By half past five the light was little more than a blaze of red through the cruciform trees. Dark took the gorge unchallenged. Fallen branches were brittle as antlers but little repositories of life spotted every living shoot of tree. Rock-hard, egg-shaped and bright green, each was an assurance of spring, the promise of life lying dormant. Buds dotted a nearby oak branch. These were different: rounded, rust-coloured and massed in clumps at the end of each meandering twig. A tall beech had pointed copper arrowheads growing from its elegant curved boughs. Perhaps it was just the illusion of their fawn hue, but the leaning pines by the river seemed to retain the faint heat of the day so I hung about their trunks as the last glass bottle-blown notes of a woodpigeon faltered and ceased. Then the river glimmered with the echo of the owls. That extraordinary, aching call. Except it’s not ‘call’, singular. The famous tu-whit, tu-whoo of children’s stories is actually two birds communicating. The female utters less a tu-whit and more a ke-wick, but even this seems a poor transposing of her brief, piercing cry. Similarly, the male’s hoot is not so much a tu-whoo, it is more a syncopated hu … hu-hulo-hooooo. Warmer than it reads. What the simplified reductions miss are the dexterous parts, the deft little trembling descent at the end like a folk balladeer adding emotional gravitas.
Such vocal attention to detail is hardly surprising. Sound is everything to tawny owls. They exist in loose communities but there are strict rules about spacing and tenancy. Territories lock together as neatly as housing plots delineated by the Land Registry, but having no sense of smell (or Land Registry), theirs is a predominately aural world. Calls are territorial assertions – this is my hunting ground; this is my mate – and like a catchy chorus, they are infectious. Hooting leads to hooting. In the pauses between them, I could hear the faint echoes of other pairs coming from downstream and from the west towards the meadow and town. I imagined the vast linguistic conversations that must flow out, around and across our night-drugged world, the silvery webs of chatter via which disputes are settled and breeding determined.
Books tell us that precisely in the same way we can recognise a change in tone in the voices of friends or family on the phone, owls living in proximity know one another through minute differences in vocalisations. Should a male fail to respond or its call sound weak, word will get around and its territory quickly snatched in a coup of chasing and hooting. But their singing is erotic too and, in established pairs, a male’s crooning stimulates ovulation. The two I could hear had almost certainly paired in the autumn and were probably well into the feathery tangles of mating. Or perhaps even past that, relaxing through post-coital rituals of preening, rest and roost, pressed up flank to flank by their nest site. There’s a softening in behaviour after copulation, a shift away from the talon-flashing late-night flirtations towards mutual trust and friendliness. Maybe the calls I could hear weren’t dirty talk; they’d moved on to rowing about kids, mortgages and money.
Although I didn’t see or hear it move, the male’s calls were suddenly directly above me in the black crown of a pine. I’d never heard an owl as clearly or closely, at the level of valves and throat vibrato, of air being worked to an owl’s purpose, but I couldn’t stay much longer. My own mate was calling; Rosie had been at home in bed for two days with sickness and exhaustion. Now she wanted feeding. The text request was unequivocal: ‘please bring pizza’. It didn’t sound much like the flu to me.
A coincidence: snow fell the exact moment I learned I was to be a father. And in that moment everything changed. Entranced by a blue line emerging in the little white window of a pregnancy test, we looked up to find snowflakes pouring into the street as if tipped from the back of a truck, obscuring where the horizon meets the grey roof slates of the terraces opposite. Then we lay together on our bed and watched the snowstorm form. Squalls of silent white swarmed the glass then backed away; flakes doubled in quantity, thickening into conjoined masses like cells dividing. The town was soundless; traffic frightened and slowed. Remember all of this, I told myself. Remember this ethereal quiet and the lines of melting snow streaking down the glass. Remember the heat of Rosie’s happy tears dampening my shirt.
After a while, a burst of laughter from guests downstairs popped our bubble. Suddenly our house was filled with life. Friends from London had booked to come up weeks earlier before any of this was on the cards. It was too early to tell them so we pretended our giddiness was down to the snow and suggested a walk in the blizzard. Half an hour later we were wrapped up and battling down Bilton Lane past houses that looked offended by the covering, like pensioners on their way to church unexpectedly caught up in an impromptu foam party. Cars were crippled. The wind rushed low and fast from the north and sent waves of snow upwards so that the storm appeared to be emanating from the edge-land. A sky of white tracer and the land beyond thick and grey as putty. It soon reached its zenith, though, and waned as we reached the crossing point. The familiar topography beyond formed slowly, as if through a demisting shower screen, then the low clouds flared with sun and evaporated into sky. Suddenly, in every direction, there were two tones: the linen-white of fresh fall and the coal-black of under-tree and under-hedge. Chaffinches struck up from hazels as we squeaked up the lane through virgin drifts. From the high rise of the fields the sun spreading over the distant reaches of the landscape made my eyes ache, but I fancied I could see further than ever, an effect wrought by this great levelling. All bumpy ground was smoothed; there was a new coat of paint. Everything clean and clear.
We let the others go ahead and stopped at a gap in the hawthorns at the holloway’s entrance. The edge-land was still new to Rosie and the view had rooted her to the spot. I put my arms around her, over her stomach, and my head on her shoulder so our faces were side by side looking at the same things – the lone oak, the razor-cut line of hills, the pylons, the smothered steeples, domes and towers of town. My mind raced with the power of nature inside and out; joy swelling and fluttering my stomach, happy as a man can naturally be. But it came with worry. I couldn’t shake the thought of how easily things can go wrong. ‘Wrong’ is not the right word, right and wrong being human concepts; what I mean is the sense of how things sometimes turn out differently from what we hope. Nature is impervious to wishes. Cells fail. Life wanes just as suddenly as a snowstorm. I said none of this, of course, but stood there taking everything in. What I remember most is the sound. The sheer, beautiful absence of it.
Turns out that sound is a pretty important part of the twelve-week scan. They don’t tell you that; the emphasis is always on what you see rather than hear, but the probe is a microphone too. Rachel leans forward, flips around the larger monitor and turns up the volume. The speakers cut in with a hollow cuurrrrrr – the static of a detuned radio or far-off industry, like the idling sewage works heard from the viaduct. Rosie’s grip on my hand tightens as the probe sits tail up in the air, nudging into her stomach. The sound becomes louder and punctuated by a quick, pounding, sluicing rhythm. A heartbeat: woosh-woosh-woosh-woosh. The whole thing is weirdly machine-like; I think of Second World War films when you can hear a ship’s propeller approaching from inside a submarine. On screen, the grainy silver-black sea resolves from owl into a little skin-skeletal shape lying horizontally with a pounding triangle in its centre, its weeny bone legs bent up to its chest.
‘Can you see the hands?’ Rachel asks as she highlights and zooms in. Not really, just a tiny, sleep-twitching fist covering the head in a boxing defence. Then it moves, shifting around onto its side as if trying to get comfortable in bed. This is what we will both remember: staring goofily at its incessant wriggling, a tiny quicksilver ghost messing up the bedclothes.
Along the hospital road, the white and pink cherry blossom is coming. There are spears of snowdrops in the gardens. I didn’t see them on the way there. The world smells cleaner. I confess to Rosie about seeing the owl in the ultrasound and she smiles. Later she says, ‘Why don’t we go down to the edge-land again? I’d like to hear the owls tonight.’
I am learning to value the tiny subtleties in times of day. The edge-land changes depending on when you arrive, but also how you arrive, almost who you are when you come here. The evening feels celebratory. The sun tints bare trees into fountains of gold, turning lone crows in their crowns into weathervanes, beaks spun round to the south-west. That long blurry fortnight of snow was blinding; now it’s as though I’ve have had my eyes tested and been prescribed stronger glasses. The skin of the earth looks grazed in patches, like a toddler’s knee; shoots of wheat push to the surface in a thin wash of green blood. Elder buds in the holloway are cracking open with tightly folded clusters of crimped, red-edged leaves. We walk quietly to the wood down a passageway brimming with momentum and trembling air. Rabbits have been digging new holes in the thawing ground, dredging deep terracotta earth and scattering it under a hazel. Silver catkins soften the dark stems of sallow. It isn’t even dark yet, but the male tawny owl is already broadcasting on long wave, calling high so his notes carry across the weir.
‘Listen!’ We hiss under our breaths, grabbing each other’s sleeves. He is less than ten feet away on the low branches of a pine, facing northwards, away from us.
You hear people talk about having ‘our song’, a tune with significance that they’ve claimed as their own. Something that became meaningful by chance, by coincidence. If it was the same with birds, ours would be an owl. A long-eared owl sang us home from one of our first dates – a night walk from pub to pub in the Lake District; resident male tawnies provided moonlight sonatas in the communal grounds of our first flat in London. Most impressive, though, was the snowy owl that gatecrashed our honeymoon. Taking a remote Cornish cottage in January for a few days seemed a sure way to get privacy, but one morning we looked through frosted windows to see the narrow lanes and fields choked with cars, binocular-browed twitchers and news crews. They had descended overnight from all over the country in the hope of catching sight of a rare visitor, a nomadic bird of the high Arctic that isn’t usually seen so far south. That white phantom haunted the copses and fields of the Zennor coast ‘like a decent-sized lamb in the trees’, as one local put it. But despite our best efforts and enviable position, we never saw her. Then one morning, ironically, as a curtain of snow approached from the west, owl and people vanished.
To get a better view tonight, we creep over pine needles and dead leaves but the tawny bores of our amateur stealth, turns and fixes us with a black-marble gaze. It feels like being caught by your parents secreting a girl into your bedroom. His ragged, dark-ringed face is fearless, frowning; his shaggy cryptic plumage blends perfectly with the bark of the tree. Tawnies roost by day but they love sunbathing and the warmth of evening light bronzes his feathers. We aren’t the only ones who’ve seen him. A great tit keeps its distance but performs elaborate flicks of wings and tail, firing rapid-note alarm calls. Daylight exposure is risky business for owls. The characteristic head and body shape is unique and, once recognised, mobbed. In times past, hunters covered trees with birdlime, stationing an owl decoy so that other birds would fly at it and became stuck. This is what the great tit’s dance moves are about, to marshal others to pester and pick at the predator until it moves away. I’ve seen this only once before in a woodland in Kent; mistle thrushes appeared and swarmed the top of a foliage-covered oak, as if grassing up the concealed female tawny within – She’s here, she’s here. Then came wave after wave of their sharp-beaked, full-frontal attacks. Few birds are so hated and feared by other birds. Even hawks are better tolerated. As Roman poet Ovid wrote of an owl: ‘She is a bird indeed … but conceals her shame in the darkness; and by all the birds she is expelled entirely from the sky.’1
Back before owls became a fixture in our fashions and furnishings, they weren’t much regarded by us, either. From biblical times, they were considered a winged harbinger of ill and the sign of darkness and ruin. In the words of Pliny the Elder, writing over 1,900 years ago: ‘He is the very monster of the night … if he be seen, it is not for good, but prognosticates some fearful misfortune.’2 This reputation probably stems from the owl’s tortured-sounding call and predilection for haunting ruined, abandoned tracts and buildings. But mud sticks. In the sixteenth century, Shakespeare reflected similar English folk beliefs in Macbeth: ‘It was the owl that shrieked, the fatal bellman, which gives the stern’st goodnight.’3 Confusingly, though, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many communities and regions believed the opposite – that the owl was as much a forecaster of good and success as it was of evil. Hooting was said to foretell the birth of a girl; an appearance near the house of a pregnant woman was said to ensure an easy delivery or the birth of a boy. Here in Yorkshire it was once claimed that whooping cough was cured by a good bowl of ‘owl broth’ and numerous recipes suggest the bird’s eggs should be eaten for rude health. Farmers certainly appreciated their skills in keeping field and wood mice down. And there was a belief among certain Native Americans that the cry of the owl was its mournful remembrance of a golden age when men and nature lived in harmony. I like that tale the most – owl as balladeer forever lamenting the Garden of Eden.
But enough of this. It’s too much to carry on little shoulders. The tawny has no interest in our speculation and superstition. It is what it is. With a last look down, he tilts his face up to the dying light and then folds away, passing low and fast over the river.
March marches on. Rosie grows. Leaves fur the trees, save for one giant sycamore in the wood that is reluctant to join the party. I can follow its naked shape from the faint feathery top down to its exposed roots. Doing so is akin to tracing the course of a mighty river on a satellite photograph; every branch is a tributary, each bursting bud at twig’s end a rising spring. It could be the Nidd, frozen, black and hauled upright. Nearby, about thirty metres from the weir, is an old beech where I’m sure the owls must be nesting, high up in a rotted hole between two great branches. The entrance is well concealed with ivy but if I listen long enough in the dark the male appears to circle from this spot in long, extending sorties. Borders are policed by his regular screeching checks that make me jump when near and at the limit of their territory become the soft, whistling high notes of wind in a chimney flue.
The male is increasingly hunting by day now, proffering gifts of what I assume must be voles, rabbits and mice to his brooding mate. I’ve bought a pair of binoculars to carry with me and raided my mother’s old birding guides for more information. They recommend determining diet by searching for the owl’s ‘pellets’, the disgorged bone and fur of its prey that act as a kind of food diary. It’s easier said than done and an effort to find anything in the decaying ground layer of last year’s leaves and emerging forests of dog’s mercury, wood anemone, lesser celandine and ramsons. Even so, the searching is an education. Winter still holds the edge-land’s hollows but everywhere else incidental riches grow, new life through the garlic-smelling earth. There are carpets of bonsai-like nettles and cleavers growing in perfect miniature. Marsh marigolds’ golden cups cluster in the streams and little waterlogged culverts near the river. I have a five-minute staring competition with a young wood mouse as it emerges from under a rock two metres away. It is unperturbed until I reach for my phone to take a photograph. I must be the first human it has seen.
It is about 5 p.m. judging by the rush-hour rumble and horns on the roads from the south and, across the river, the boom and clatter of metal as arable machinery trundles back to barns. Shadows are lengthening and there’s the rusty cook-cook of a pheasant and twittering robins. The male tawny is alone on the edge of the wood, perched on the wrist of an oak’s long, thick limb. There’s enough mustard light to use the binoculars and, in the natural hide of the holloway, I prop my elbows on a low branch and take in the details of his muted and mottled cream and chocolate feathers. They have an unbelievable smoothness, like a luxury truffle, the sort you buy in those twirling seashell shapes. He moves his head mechanically, rotating that facial disc like a satellite.
Actually, the more you read about a tawny owl’s hearing, the more sci-fi it all feels. Their ears are roughly ten times more sensitive than ours and able to detect low-frequency nuanced sounds over considerable distance, even those as subtle as the rustlings of prey moving through vegetation. I say ‘ears’, but they’re actually two openings positioned asymmetrically either side of the face hidden by feathers that have adapted to be ‘transparent’ to sound waves. The left opening is positioned higher than the right, which points downward to improve the owl’s sensitivity to noises from below. All sound coming from beneath its line of sight is therefore louder in its right ear. Running through the skull and linking the two eardrums is a passage packed with auditory neurons that tell the brain the fractional differences in the times of arrival of sounds to each ear. Instantly translating this data – right, left, up, down – the owl precisely maps and pinpoints the source.
Then he falls off the branch like he’s been shot and I lose him in my glasses. Lowering them and squinting, I catch a brown blur plummeting towards the field and rush to fix them on him again. It’s all so swift and silent; his wing feathers serrated like a comb to eliminate any flying noise. His head stays perfectly still, his spectacular vision is now locked-on but, mid-flight, perhaps only five feet from the ground, he makes a correction and banks left, bringing his feet forward and extending his talons, swooping his wings down as though he means to smother the prey for good measure. The moment of the strike is lost in the dwarf wheat but I watch as he immediately bobs his head in a series of flinging, violent blows. My heart is in my throat. Then, after a minute, the owl looks around nonchalantly and rises, carrying off the crumpled grey ball of a baby rabbit. A life ended before it has begun; a stomach fed. All the while the pheasant and robins continue with their idle chit-chatting. Nothing sees; nothing cares. The hunt, the death, all of it seems so shockingly routine.
Later I come home to find Rosie opening a letter from the hospital confirming the date for our twenty-week ultrasound scan. As she jots the date in the calendar, I read the much-photocopied NHS literature explaining how it all works, how the probe sends high-frequency sound (1 to 5 megahertz) into the body and listens to the echoes that return. Apparently the sound waves hit the boundaries between fluid and flesh or muscle and bone. Some bounce back to the probe; others travel further to be reflected by another boundary. Perched on the belly, the probe hears the millionths-of-a-second frequency differences between them and using the equation of the speed of sound in tissue (1,540 metres per second) the machine processes and resolves the distances, mapping the body’s internal landscape in a two-dimensional image. The leaflet also carries a word or two of caution. The more detailed investigation is also known as the anomaly scan. You find out if all those boundaries, bones and bits of flesh are behaving properly. ‘The ultrasound occasionally detects some serious abnormalities,’ it warns at the bottom, ‘so you should be prepared for that information.’
Again, so routine.
The anatomical and emotional changes in women during pregnancy are well known and documented, but impending parenthood alters a man too. There’s a lot less said about that, but I’m feeling it already. The skin becoming thinner and more sensitive, the world even more glorious and cruel.
The week is crashing out with the vindictiveness of an army laying waste to the ground. A wet storm-wind shrieks from the west into the edge-land across miles of hill and farmland. It tells of wars being fought and battles approaching. ‘This is unbearable,’ shouts a lady buffeted from car to front door as her umbrella leaps from her grasp and vanishes over a hedge.
The gales are strong enough to drive leaves from the wood all the way up Bilton Lane like scuttling refugees heading for the safety of town. I head in the opposite direction, passing the crossing point before slipping left over the little ford and up the lane. There is nobody else here and the trees usher me away with frantic gestures. The wrong way! You’re going the wrong way! A swirling acrid wind makes it hard to breathe and look in any direction for long and I envy the rabbits and voles huddled now in burrows. A coal tit crashes into a holly looking for protection; I seek shelter too, running for the holloway as shouts and moans howl through its hazel walls. By the wood an ash flails and I wrap my arms around its trunk to stay upright. The whole place is in distress. Canopies throb and merge as pines roar their anguish over the river. To escape the barrage of debris and air I wedge myself between two pine stumps. It is at once terrifying and invigorating, as if I am looking up from the ocean floor as a tsunami passes overhead. But if I kneel I can just about see the owl’s tree and follow its swaying trunk with the binoculars. Chances are the female tawny is inside nesting. It worries me. Wind and rain smashing and percolating through woodland destroys an owl’s ability to use sound, making hunting extremely difficult, and the pair must be hungry. Regardless, the field guides confirm she will be incubating between two and five white eggs, each laid a week apart. Weather or no weather, life goes on.
The wind pitches louder, higher like a dynamo being wound into a scream and a trunk falls somewhere. A quick look over the parapet; it’s not the owls’ tree, but how long until it is? In the darkening underworld of the forest floor I feel the thin line between life and death running like a fault below me. Still, I stay put out of some sense of fatherly solidarity. It’s just nature, though, I tell myself, whatever happens. Then, from nowhere, a rising tide of emotion hits me and I find I’m thinking of my friend Peter who died unexpectedly, unnecessarily, in an accident seven months ago. I feel the same slow soul-sadness I’ve experienced regularly since answering the 2 a.m. call from his cousin, an unreal mix of helplessness and incomprehension. Then that yawning absence. Like touching an electric fence, it’s the sudden jolt of finding yourself at the margins where human and nature step outside the neat categories we give them, those moments when we’re suddenly forced to confront the non-negotiable fine print of our existence. These are the other moments when we hear the undetectable frequencies and unforgettable sounds, like on the night I heard about Peter: the crack in his cousin’s voice and, after I’d told her, Rosie’s repeated ‘Oh no’, a trembling hand half-covering her mouth.
Out here in the edge-land, transformation is in everything. With a million life-and death-moments happening each millisecond, you never escape the sense of shifting states. I know the water I can hear crashing over the weir is destined to become open sea and although it will no longer be ‘river’, it will still exist. And one day it will be resurrected into rain again. It’s just the same with the baby rabbit and the owl. Energy never runs out, it only changes from one form to another. It can’t be created or destroyed. Every joule hurtling past me was present at the beginning and will be there at the end. There’s consolation in that, for sure, but try telling it to the dad pacing a hospital corridor as his baby is operated on for congenital heart failure. This is the problem with ‘nature’: it is ambivalent to what makes humans tick. And yet it is what makes us tick. The two can be hard to reconcile sometimes.
For three nights I have vivid dreams of being in a crow’s nest on a raging sea. Our house crashes, woos and roars as the air screams around it, like some Victorian machine pushed to its limit. But now the pangs and pings outside sound like the engine is finally cooling and contracting.
As soon as I can, I run down to the wood, dodging the broken sticks, plastic bags and fast-food cartons still skidding under cars and over pavements. Garden conifers suddenly strain and roar. A screeching call of distress sounds from a garden by the crossing point, like a blackbird trapped by a cat’s claw. Hurrying to the gate I see a car in a drive with its bonnet up, a man wedged sideways underneath in mucky overalls. He catches my look of surprise before turning back to the real source of the noise, a faulty ignition.
From the old railway northward the earth is battle-scarred. Cracked trees slump as if contemplating the bone-white heartwood bursting from their bodies. The air has ripped through the hedges along the lane, slashing and tearing as it scattered felled limbs, snapped sticks and shredded young foliage everywhere. Another fizzing clicking sound cuts the air, this time from over the fields. It is an electricity pylon crackling from its high triangular crown like a giant insect scratching its mandibles. In a dip in the farmland to the north, a copse grapples with the vanishing wind in a final skirmish. Then the earth falls quiet again. I stand below the pylon listening to its alien song as evening drifts over the wounded land, softly, a shaken sheet floating down onto a bed. I’m wondering how anything can have lived through it when the tumbling notes of blackbirds pour from the holloway and wood. Then, louder, flung up towards the milk-moon above, the long hu … hu-hu-lo-hooooo of a tawny owl.
Fast forward. We are back in the Antenatal Clinic. Once again we take a seat on the line of smart red chairs. This time our hands are spread over Rosie’s swollen bump. Our disinfected palms and fingers feel the fluttering kicks and movements from within. Opposite me, the owl is still Blu-tacked to its wall, solitary in that broccoli tree stuck between the noticeboards. How long it’ll be there, though, I’m not sure; a toddler turned loose by his exasperated and heavily pregnant mum is having a good stab at tearing it down. ‘Me-me,’ he says, dragging at its corner. You said it, kiddo.
Among the many fantastic shapes and colours that make up the bird world, tawny owls do look remarkably similar to us – the two-legged vertical posture, the rounded head, the big eyes, the binocular vision, the cheek-like face and that beak projecting downward like a little hooked nose. Even the white-grey tufts of down around its face could pass for an unkempt moustache on an old general. These resemblances, of course, explain why they’ve been elevated into the realm of soft toys and grace our furnishings, clothes, bags and wallpaper. It’s vanity. We’re rewarding their human cuteness. The subconscious connotation is an old one, the Disney view of nature as something we can master, adjust and appropriate. Something just like us. In many instances this may be true, but watching birds of prey up close or the proximity of a birth or death forces us to think differently: we engage with nature directly, emotionally, microscopically, at the level of atoms, cells, blood, flesh and bone. We briefly see under its skin and witness its contrariness, its randomness, relentlessness, ruthlessness and beauty.
Sitting with my hand hovering over my unborn child, I feel none of the indestructibility that gives our species its hard edge and cynicism. Rather, I’m acutely aware that we are as susceptible to fickle fortune as every other living thing. In a heartbeat or baby-kick, all of our modern disconnection can be stripped back to its opposite. We seek reassurance; I hold Rosie’s hand. And there it is: the hand, the arm around the shoulder, the soft kiss on the forehead, the inner voice you find uttering a silent prayer in a hospital waiting room. We often forget, but this is nature too.
‘Now, would you like to find out the baby’s sex today?’ Rachel asks, closing the blind as Rosie lies back and rolls up her top.
‘No, I think we’ll wait. We’d like a surprise.’
‘Good,’ says Rachel. ‘I think that’s nice.’
Lights. The dashboard fires up. Another flight, this time over familiar ground. The probe circles, perches and listens. Rachel talks throughout this time, listing body parts as though reading the shipping forecast – brain: good; arms: good; shoulders, ribs and pelvis: good. She pauses occasionally to measure or make notes, and then turns the monitor around. Everything is discernible now in that black-silver sea: fingers, feet, hips, a little nose, knees. I can see its body flex and reform in amazing detail as the noise of the heartbeat pounds fast and strong, like thundering hooves.
‘You have a very healthy happy little baby,’ Rachel says eventually. ‘Would you like a photo?’
I fold the printout into my wallet, a cocoon for the little one.
But that’s all to come. Tonight I go down to the wood again. The tawny owls’ nest has survived the storms, for the male is out hunting early again, bringing food to his mate as she incubates their eggs. Setting up my binoculars on the pine stumps, I try to picture the embryonic owlets tucked up there in the tree and think about their chances. It wouldn’t be wise to get any closer, though; tawnies are famously vicious in their defence of the nest and known to attack dogs and humans if they stray too near. Such protective spirit is a fairly short-lived instinct, however. Their parents will care for the young birds for two or three months after they fledge then, around August, the juveniles will disperse to find a place to call their own. If they fail to find a vacant territory, they’ll quickly starve or, in weakened states, fall victim to predators. Nature will take its course. No hospitals, medicines, warmth or love to intervene.
I leave them to it and walk back over the crossing point, heading for town to buy groceries for dinner. I carry that call with me and think about how lucky I am. As Edward Thomas has it in his poem ‘The Owl’:
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry
Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.4