Owl Pellets
(Editor's note: Science writer Miriam Darlington has long been captivated by owls, and in her memoir "The Wise Hours" she travels throughout her native England as well as to other countries to learn more about them. But when her son Benji falls ill, her search for a cure for his mysterious disease becomes enmeshed with her fieldwork.)
In March I'd started to find owl pellets. Between the size of a conker and a champagne cork, these undigested, regurgitated remains had been cast along with whitewash splatters beneath the old oak near my home. These were signs that indicated only one thing: the presence of an owl. As the days lengthened, my interest deepened. Barn Owls begin to pair up in late winter and might settle on a roost that will be a good potential nesting site. In the privacy of their nest cavity or a hidden roost high within the beams of an old barn there will be much courtship bonding. All through the spring, mutual face-preening and cheek-rubbing are interspersed with the male bringing the female gifts of voles. If they can get into breeding condition and the food supply is good, around 75 percent can breed anytime between March and August, but eggs have been found in January, and it is possible that if the owls are in the right condition they could breed at any time in a good year. If it is a bad year, and their habitat does not provide enough voles, mice or shrews, breeding is more likely to fail, or even not take place at all.
I watched the roost. Sometimes in the tree an alert whiteness was perched, watchful, occasionally uttering nervous calls. Around the same time as my owl-watching, out of the bedrock of our home a series of tremors happened. One of our own young got sick. It was an illness that was so unusual, so difficult to diagnose and then to treat, that its unfolding had a seismic effect on us. Perhaps illness is always like this, from the common cold to cancer, all of them jostling somewhere on a Richter scale of life change. It was around April when we noticed the first signs. My nineteen-year-old Benji and I were sitting by the river, where the crepuscular soundscape of bird chorus was heightening over the marsh. For Benji, on the cusp of moving into the adult world, this was time off before his final year in college, where he was learning to design and build houses. I relished his quirky end-of-teenage company sitting next to me, close and content. I knew that there would not be much more of this. Soon he might be away at university and things would never be quite the same. When he tipped awkwardly sideways, shivered for a few moments, and slowly righted himself, I thought nothing of it. He was quiet for a moment and then he said: "Do you ever get that thing where you start twitching?" I turned to look at him, puzzled.
We didn't know it, but somewhere in the invisible pathways of Benji's brain, some synapse was misfiring. Amongst the millions of neurons inside his head, messages were going awry between nerve and nerve, from pathway to pathway.
We would often come down to the reed beds like this to hear the owls. It's hard to write this in hindsight and accept that, at that point, we had no idea of what was to come for Benji. At that moment, our attention was all on one owl, and now it was calling across the reeds to another: a screech, then a reply, as if they were throwing lightning bolts to one another, as if each was catching the other's cry in its craw and lobbing it back.
"Look," Benji said, feeling better again. He touched my arm and we watched a white owl lift free of the reeds and emerge to glide across the river. Its body was reflected in the caught light of the water.
Excerpted from "The Wise Hours: A Journey Into the Wild and Secret World of Owls" by Miriam Darlington. Published with permission from Tin House. Copyright(c) 2018 by Miriam Darlington. First US publication by Tin House, 2023.
