Tawny Owls – sleepless nights and mixed metaphors?
The beginning of Autumn is bad news for insomniacs and babies. The former must bear the additional night-time burden of hooting owls as it’s this time of the year when Tawny Owl families start preparing for their next breeding season. This involves a lot of intrusive twitting and twoo-ing, loved or hated in equal measure by nature-lovers and the superstitious among us.
It’s good news for the nature lover as, to begin with, a twitt followed by a twoo means both male and female are present – a sine qua non for a successful coming breeding season. The call often rendered kee-wik is the female, answered by the who-oo of the male. This signifies both partners have survived another year – an adult owl has a seventy-five percent chance of annual survival, a typical lifespan being four years. Even though only one in three of their last year’s young is likely to survive the winter, it’s time for it to move on, and the male’s hooting serves notice of this: ‘move on and find your own mate and territory please’!
And the babies? It was well known by the Ancients that owls drank their blood at night – not that there were many reliable contemporary eye-witness accounts. But if Shakespeare is to be believed, the hooting of an owl has always been a portent of doom. Being associated with nighttime too there would naturally be superstitions about death and the devil, the latter sometimes warded off by nailing an owl to your door. A bit like us warding off intruders by displaying a pretend notice about CCTV on ours.
It’s supposed that owls can see in the dark of course. They can see little better than us, but they have evolved acute stereoscopic hearing (their ears are asymmetrically located in the facial disk to achieve this) that allows them to pinpoint small movements of their prey – mainly rodents or small birds. And an occasional baby perhaps. Operating under the cover of darkness is a sure-fire way of persuading the superstitious that owls are up to no good, so the birds were readily linked to nefarious nighttime activities. Owler was a name given to Kentish smugglers bringing in illicit brandy, and many a Marden ghost story would have resulted from an encounter with a screeching barn owl in a foggy winter churchyard, by Red Lyon Ale House revellers on their drunken homeward stagger.
It's an easy step from wailing to wisdom. Why else have we so many Wise Owls and owlish literary figures that amuse and comfort small children while our ancestors viewed them with suspicion? Even the Owl who sailed away with the Pussycat had a sad side. Edward Lear wrote the comic poem to cheer up a little girl struggling to understand the reasons for her rich parents’ unhappy marriage; her father was having an extra-marital affair of the kind that got Oscar Wilde imprisoned.
It seems that, when left to their own devices we think owls are wonderful. It’s only when they come close to humans that they take on a sinister air. Perhaps our ambivalent attitude to these splendid birds is best explained by Winnie the Pooh’s wise friend in the Hundred Acre Wood. How could anyone be harmed by someone wise enough to spell his own name Wol?
Sleep well.
Ray Morris, Marden Wildlife, September 2025