Free The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar by Martin Windrow

spent in the kitchen cage, she would amuse herself by tearing up her newspaper ‘bedroom carpet’ and dropping tiny shreds of it out of the cage until they formed a drift on the lino floor below – sweeping these up and replacing her cage lining became an almost daily chore. Ripping things up seemed to be her favourite game, and since her curiosity was insatiable I soon learned not to leave anything vulnerable lying around.
    When she was loose in the flat and I wanted her to come to me for any other reason I would catch her eye and tap a finger on my shoulder, and she would hop up at once – or, more often, down. As soon as she moved in she was able to jump from any convenient bit of furniture up to the top of the open living-room door. From there she had an unobstructed view of the whole room and of the distant world outside the window-wall, and it immediately became her favourite perch. At weekends, when I let her stay loose around the flat all day, she would doze comfortably on the door top for hours at a time. (When she awoke from a daytime snooze she often gave a little whistling sneeze – ‘
snit!
’ – followed by a shake of her head, and two or three ruminative beak-clacks. If I picked her up while she was still a bit dozy she stepped back on to my hand trustfully but with a slightly careful gait, like a drunk concentrating on negotiating a flight of steps.)
    From her first arrival in the flat Mumble pursued the natural ‘branching’ behaviour of a fledgling, manifested particularly in her case by a fascination with exploring all cupboards, corners and crannies. If I happened to leave a cardboard box or an empty carrier bag lying around, she was into it like a venturesome kitten; sometimes she would stay inside it for quite a while, and I occasionally found her actually lying down inside, flat on her front like a broody chicken, with her head cocked back. If I left the sliding doors of the long wardrobe in my hallway open even a crack, I would soon hear a croon or – after the first couple of weeks – a fluting war-whoop, quiet but insistent, echoingfrom deep inside it: ‘
w-o-o-o … w-o-o-o … w-o-o-o
’. (It reminded me of the noise we made as children by flipping a hand over our mouths when playing cowboys and Indians.) She would clamber in the dark inside the wardrobe from shoulder to shoulder of the coats and jackets hanging there until she reached the deepest corner. Were the accompanying whoops, I wondered, anything to do with some instinct to ask if a dark hole was already occupied by somebody else? She did not seem to be seeking refuge from anything, but simply enjoying active exploration. (Although some owl species are known for using underground burrows, I’ve never come across any reference to tawnies doing this.)
    One day, when I started to worry about not being able to find her in any of her usual haunts, a noticeably muffled call led me into the kitchen, and down on my knees to peer under the table fixed to one wall. I had completely forgotten that, hidden under it, a hole was cut in the plaster board wall to give access to the water stopcock. Luckily it was too small to accommodate even Mumble’s remarkably compressible body, but she had stuck her head into it, and was warbling monotonously into the thickness of the wall. She kept this up for several minutes, bobbing and twisting her head as she whooped into the darkness, and seemed to listen for a response. I never could decide if she could hear the enticing scuttle of vermin in there, or if it was just another example of her general fixation with intriguing dark corners.
    * * *
Diary:
25 July 1978
(
c
. 3 months old)
    Her tameness is apparently unaffected by growing, though she starts, and sometimes flies to my shoulder, at loud noises – a gunshot on TV, say, or loud music when I change radio channels (she’s fine with Thomas Tallis or Linda Ronstadt, but is less keen on Stravinsky or the Stones). She has even behaved beautifully