Free Common Ground by Rob Cowen Page B

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