THREE

THE POSSIBILITIES OF broken-open tree trunks were the barn owl’s first resort for nest sites, as now (after centuries of dependency on the cast-off buildings of the people, and a few decades of woodland edge nest boxes) they are still an option and in some places the preferred option. Here is a quiet corner of the foothills of the southmost Highlands, with a badger sett at its heart. The sett is flanked by yet another hill burn (badgers insist on the proximity of water) contained between two more crumbling dykes and one dilapidated fence, all of which the badgers cross with ease. Beyond these is a swooping grass field with trees on three sides.

The badger knows the barn owl. They are kindred spirits of the half-light and the dark, and like the barn owl, the badger can also unleash upon the most profound night silence a scream to freeze the blood of every creature of woodland and field, hillside and moor and clifftop, and for that matter of every badger-and-owl-watcher. Badger and barn owl are also both occasional, reluctant daylight travellers, reluctant because in daylight they lose most of the advantages that nature has bestowed on them. They meet all the time as they patrol their territory, and less often inside woodland than outside it, ships that pass in the night fields, mostly without so much as a nod of recognition. This very corner of the Trossachs is the only place where I have ever seen them meet head on, or to be more accurate, I did not see the actual meeting but rather the immediate aftermath of the meeting.

I was watching a badger sett on a beautiful evening of late May. The usual cast of bit-part players strolled on and off stage delivering their lines flawlessly – roebuck, robin, woodcock, with noises off from cuckoo and drumming snipe – but by 10pm I had not seen a single badger. It happens. Even at the busiest badger setts there are inexplicable blank nights, inexplicable to the badger-watcher that is. It does not mean that no badgers have emerged, only that you have not seen them emerge. On the night in question I decided to give it one more hour, just in case, although I was in a mood of rare pessimism about my chances.

I was also uncomfortable (uncomfortable, that is, by the standards of badger watching in a truly wild landscape, which is not a pursuit for the faint-hearted or the lap-of-luxury-dweller). The wind was from an unusual airt and that ruled out the best vantage point. Instead I was stuck with a fallen beech trunk. It was okay to sit on except that sitting on it offered no view of the sett. Standing on it I could see some of the sett but it was a precarious stance with only flimsy surviving branches for hand-holds. I was standing by the beech, leaning on its fallen trunk and weighing the options when I saw one of the badger cubs squeeze under the fence and pad along beside the burn. The adventurous independence of the cubs at eight or nine weeks is impressive (April births are not rare this far north). Mustelline curiosity and courage and a robust attitude to life and all its obstacles seem to be in place from the outset.

Here was the diversion I was looking for. I decided to follow it. In wellies and waterproof trousers I simply walked down the burn until I reached the point where I had seen the cub squirm under the fence. But it had already negotiated the maze of rocks that once constituted a wall and the burn which was about four feet wide. I felt the volume of water that tugged at my boots where I stood and wondered why the cub had not been tossed a few yards downstream with a skinful of broken bones for its trouble. Instead, there it was at the top of the easier grass slope on the far side of the burn. It stood there for a few seconds, a tiny silhouette. Then it moved off downhill into the brave new world of the field, and I stepped out of the burn and followed.

Possibly until this very moment, the badger cub had never seen such a place. There had been the first dark underground weeks, then the first stumblings in late evening light around the sett, then the first explorations of the closed-in, tree-shadowed, brackeny limits of the clearing. Then the evening came when it dared its first crossing of the burn, the climb up the far bank, then the first sight of the field and a blazing evening sky stopped it in its tiny tracks.

The cub was also about to make another discovery, one that would confer on the field the status of the promised land. One scoop of a clawed foot, one brief foray of a questing snout in the soft earth, and it had tapped into a lifetime’s supply of what it is that a badger loves best in all the wild world: earthworms. As far as I could tell at a discreet distance among the trees it ate four in its first fifty yards, but those fifty yards took at least ten minutes. A badger cub eating worms does not make spectacular progress. Not only must the worms be found, but every other square inch must be scented and sifted for food or danger or just to satisfy the urge of curiosity that is the badge of all its tribe.

Then, somewhere high up on that hillside field in the last of the light, something triggered the cub’s sense of its solitary vulnerability. I had seen and heard nothing untoward, but suddenly the cub turned and ran. It ran as I had never seen anything run before. It’s hair stood on end and it looked as if no part of the creature was in contact with the ground. It had just tasted its first worms, now it tasted first fear. It darted into the trees, half rolled down the bank, splashed chaotically through the water, negotiated the broken wall and the fence and vanished into the sett.

So what was that all about? I looked back the way the badger had come and found a pale stirring there, a barn owl working the thick, uncut grass at the field’s edge. Between the first taste of worms and the first taste of fear, it transpired that the cub had also seen its first ghost, eerie, long-winged, twilit, silent, and adrift on the air a couple of notches above badger cub eye-level. It is difficult to imagine a more unnerving set of circumstances in which to encounter your first barn owl. The cub had yet to learn that the barn owl is a mouser to trade, that the owl considers the badger – even at cub dimensions – altogether too ferocious to tangle with. And it is just possible that the badger – even a fully grown boar – considers the sight of the barn owl (and sight is the least accomplished of the badger’s senses) just too unearthly for its liking and keeps its own distance.

And if the badger knows the barn owl, then so does the badger-watcher. I was sitting on the same fallen tree in another season, and had taken some trouble to adjust my position to snuff out the wind that had been nibbling in an unendearing way at my left ear. I had let my eyes and ears rove around the wood, and I had grown still. I had become a fragment of the woodland dusk myself. That, at least, was how I imagined I appeared to the natives of the wood, until something unsettled me, and whatever instinct had alerted me to whatever it was also commanded me to duck and hunch my shoulders. At that moment a large, pale blur appeared from above and behind my head, banked sharp left along the line of the fallen trunk and vanished the way it had come. As it banked and came into focus, it became a barn owl, and the wordless cry that escaped from my lips – “Uhh!” – was the most unworthy sound I have ever uttered either in the company of a barn owl or in the confines of a woodland dusk.

It was then that I realised I had heard nothing at all. When a mute swan flies, the rhythm throbs heraldically across open water; Sibelius at work on the end of his fifth symphony reached for the horn section to convey the sound. When a golden eagle flies you hear the whuff-whuff-whuff-whuff of windmill sails. Raven wings creak like old hinges. But the barn owl had flown within inches of my head, white legs dangling and kinked in at the knees. It banked in front of my face, and left nothing in its wake but silence, a silence that unnerved me.

But consider this. If the barn owl’s flight unnerved me, a fairly solidly built six-footer-in-my-boots, imagine the effect it has on voles, mice, rats moles, beetles, moths and frogs. (I have heard it said that they also eat bats and fish, which may be true if the bat is comatose, hanging upside down from a branch or rafter, and the fish has already been killed and dropped by an osprey or an otter; otherwise I don’t believe it.) Most of the time, barn owls just eat voles, voles whose only defence is stillness or a risky dash and an ancient inheritance of fear. It is reasonable to assume that, confronted with the kind of flypast I had just been granted, a vole might simply die of fright where it stood.

* * *

NOT FAR FROM THAT BADGER SETT, a minor road crosses a low ridge of hills. In many a dusk I have crossed paths with the local barn owls, and a hunting bird has cut a low swathe through my car’s headlight beam or stared from a fencepost as the car crawled past. There is a lay-by near the summit of the road where I am accustomed to pull in, switch off engine and lights, open the window and let the dusky quiet of the place rush in.

The first sound is often a roebuck, typically four harsh gutturals delivered from the same place, then four more, travelling, coming closer. The edge of a plantation forest is just over my right shoulder; he’s in there and he may be coming out. The binoculars are already on the passenger seat, their accustomed place whenever I cross that road at barn owl time.

So the roebuck walked into view, head turned away from me and towards the west. He walked in a gentle arc towards the roadside fence, which he cleared from a standing start. He stopped in the middle of the road with his chest facing east, his head south. I was to his north. He turned his head again to face west along his spine, then (a thing I have not seen before in many years of roe deer watching) turned it again to look north across his back – he had turned his head and neck through 270 degrees.

Then the owl.

It came from the same direction as the buck, and as it also crossed the fence between the buck and the car, the buck’s gaze followed it until he had to turn his head and neck back the way it had come to face east where the owl perched on a fencepost across the road. So now I know how far a roebuck can turn his head, and the point at which he can go no further.

The owl, unconcerned by deer or car, began to study the grass beyond the fence with its back to me. In the glasses and the very last of the light, I saw it tip forward, open its wings, and drop a yard to a soft thud in the grass.

But it was up out of the grass almost at once with nothing to show for the pounce. Then it flew in tight curves, quartering the open ground of grass and clear-felled tree roots, never more than a yard above the ground, dipping a wing-tip, lifting again, resuming, head-down hunter of the dusk. Then it rose abruptly into the bare branches of a dead birch and perched.

Then it screamed.

If you didn’t see that coming, if you didn’t know that banshee sound was in its repertoire, if you knew only the owl of the unsettling silence, God knows what you might make of it. I turned briefly to look at the deer, but it had gone.

Another car appeared on the road going too fast and too loud and making smithereens of the dusky calm, the gloaming cut open by main-beam lights with added spotlights. Strange: the owl screams and immediately deepens the power of the silence that follows. The car roars and immediately wrecks what was there before, and the noise lingers and rises and falls as it follows the rises and falls and curves of the road. The smell of its exhaust drifts in the open windows. What now?

I put the glasses on the tree: nothing. I checked all the fenceposts: nothing.

But there was something by the edge of the road that wasn’t there before – the owl, facing the grass verge, but lying, not standing. I walked over, bent down slowly, touched it gently: nothing. I turned it over. There was no blood, no mark. No sign of life either. I was just a few miles from the home of a friend who is better at looking after road casualties than I am. I put my hands beneath the warm belly of the owl and carried it back to the car with all the solemnity of an undertaker.

I made a cushion of a fleece jacket on the back seat and laid it there. As I drove off I was seething with a dangerous cocktail of anger and contempt for the driver of the other car, but I had not gone far when the owl appeared on the headrest of the passenger seat. I put my left arm out, a reflex action, and I felt the talons grip and bite. The pain was extraordinary.

Bringing a moving car to a standstill without the use of my left hand was a new experience in my life. It is far more difficult than it sounds, and far more difficult still when your left wrist has a traumatised owl’s talons embedded in it. I opened the passenger window from the controls on the driver’s door. I leaned the owl towards the window. Perhaps it would fly from there? It would not. I didn’t want to risk bringing it back into the car so that I could exit by the driver’s door, so I swung my legs over the gear lever, and (again, one-handed) achieved a gruesome exit through the passenger door.

Out in the night air again, the owl showed no inclination to let go. I tried to prompt it with a few gentle upward gestures of my left hand and arm. The owl held on.

I took it over to the fence, put my hand beside a post, and it simply stepped off. The relief as it relinquished its grip was as indescribable as the pain.

I backed off to the car where I slowly calmed down. I watched the motionless owl on the fence post for ten minutes. What did it make of what had just happened to it? Was it aware of a brush with death, of rescue, of anything at all other than those things that are strictly necessary to survive from day to day, night to night? Was it doing the same as I was – calming down?

Suddenly it flew, following the line of the fence, then a low arc just above the grasses. It flew past the car’s open door not ten feet away. It is the silence of the flight that unnerves.

* * *

THIS IS ALSO osprey country. The wider Trossachs area, and especially embracing the Lake of Menteith, sustains more ospreys than anywhere else in Scotland outwith Strathspey. It was not always thus. When the first two birds turned up here in the early 1970s after an absence of a hundred years or so, I was one of a small group of volunteers who maintained an all-night vigil to try and thwart egg thieves. The nest could hardly have presented a more tempting target, the top of an old dead stump of a tree not twenty feet high. All they would have needed was a ladder. After a couple of years the surrounding plantation trees grew too tall and the ospreys moved to the summit of a huge conifer where they prospered.

Osprey also knows barn owl. This I discovered – emphatically – at four in the morning, sitting on sentry duty outside a “camouflaged” tent (it was dirty green, its only virtue) that had failed to keep out the night’s light rainfall but rather had accommodated it in a small pool near my head during the hours when I had been failing to sleep. We worked in pairs and in shifts and it was with some relief that I emerged about 3am into the now dry and awakening world outside. Watchers were commanded to stillness by the circumstances: the tent was pitched in the only possible place with a view of the eyrie tree a hundred yards away, and with no cover whatsoever. There was, for example, a simple rule about going to the toilet – do it in the dark. But that insistence on daylight stillness also brought rewards, as stillness in nature’s company always does. At four o’clock the sun was just under the horizon and one of those rewards was a barn owl.

I became aware of it because I was watching the sitting osprey and the osprey had spotted it. Her attitude suddenly changed from relaxed to agitated, taut. Her head was up and craning and she gave voice, not exactly an alarm call but a cry that held (it seemed to me) an edge of challenge, and she was staring at something to my left. I thought perhaps the male was approaching with an early morning fish, but the call was wrong. I turned my head to follow her line of inquiry and there was the owl, coming my way, fifty yards away at head height, closing. That startling moment would inform my appreciation thirty years later of the badger cub’s terror – my first head-on view of being stalked by a ghost too.

The owl sheared off when it was about twenty feet away from me, by which time I had seriously begun to wonder how I might defend myself. But the owl was simply a little slower than I had expected in identifying my seated shape, and it took immediate avoiding action once it recognised me for what I was. It gave me and the tent a hard stare and a wide berth, and in the same silent and unhurried gait it flew in a gentle climbing arc behind me and turned towards the osprey tree where the sitting female watched it every yard of the way. When it passed the tree it was absolutely at the osprey’s eye-level. They simply looked at each other in passing, then the owl was gone.

From beginning to end, it was one of the more curious moments I have spent in nature’s company, and recollection of the incident now comes complete with a frisson of recognition, recognition of the inadequacy of my response to the moment: I was pondering how to defend myself! Now I would burn the buoyant, bouncing beauty of the flight deep into my mind and at the first possible moment, I would try and write it down.

But this I know. The barn owl and the osprey take notice of each other, and there may be no other reason for it than that they are both white-faced, white-breasted, white under-winged conspicuous birds. And in that particular circumstance, the osprey had just set up home in the barn owl’s territory, and the owl would never have seen anything like it before. By now, however, there are many ospreys in the barn owl’s spring and summer landscape, and the barn owl will know the osprey is a fish eater and the osprey will know the barn owl is a mouser, and each will know their chicks are not threatened by the other, and while a particularly aggressive male osprey might do all it can to discourage the owl from the core of his territory, the local osprey nests are in much taller trees, and the owl is likely to view the osprey’s silhouette with nothing more than a passing unease, and from far below.