What a Hoot

And these days, the spotted owlets in the Nicholson cemetery in Civil Lines, Delhi, which my bedroom overlooks, are chittering and squabbling querulously even at three in the morning. It is their breeding season and the stress of love and courtship and fighting rivals makes them (as it does us) tetchy. Actually, they’re sweet dumpy looking birds, with icing sugar spots on their round brown heads, big golden eyes and an endearing way of bobbing their heads as they try and get a measure of you. Sometimes you can see them during the day. One monsoon morning, many years ago, a spotted owlet (pictured right) camped in a small tree right in front of my balcony for the entire day, unperturbed by the agitation it caused amongst other birds. It wasn’t injured; it just stayed, meditating calmly on the tree till dusk and allowed me to go virtually right up to it, without flicking a feather. At dusk, it flew off.

The other fairly common “resident” owl in Delhi is the mushroom coloured barn owl, with its heart-shaped face and a terrifying repertoire of shrieks and screeches. One never-to-be-forgotten winter morning in Qudsia gardens, near Kashmere Gate, I watched a pair smooch passionately as a frosty sun came up: with a face shaped thus what else could you expect? Three woolly babies, perched one on top of the other, grumpily waited for their parents to finish canoodling as the babblers and mynas began heckling.

Owls are known to fly silently. Just how silently, I realised, at a Raptor Rehabilitation Centre in California years ago. Three or four barn owls were recuperating in a huge cage and would regularly fly up and down the length of this. Watching from three feet away, I couldn’t hear the faintest whisper of a wing-beat. It was uncanny; like watching a silent film. With their acute hearing and eyesight, and this phantom flight, their prey — rats and other rodents mainly — have a hope in hell to escape.

With their fierce, glowering expression, you would imagine owls would be very straitlaced and proper, puritanical even in their family life. No hanky-panky or mucking around with multifarious boyfriends and girlfriends here. But I discovered that the burrowing owl (a charming North American species I encountered in California) had a delightfully bohemian lifestyle. These guys believed in free love. They lived in underground burrows, close together and it was par for the course, that the hunk in one burrow made eyes at the babe next door, and the babe in another burrow fluttered her eyelashes at the beefcake across the road. The babies thus, were very often of mixed parentage, a good proportion of siblings were really half-siblings, with mama living here and papa there and vice versa! And the babies were completely bindass about wandering in and out of each others’ homes. Well, this was California after all, so it would have been disappointing to expect anything else.

We owe owls big time: barn owls specialise in rat extermination, and rats as we know devour up to 20 per cent of our foodgrain stocks (apart from harbouring and distributing largesse such as bubonic plague and other delights). While we may not, like the mad earl of Gormenghast, go to the extent of offering ourselves as sacrifice to the birds, we need to respect them more.
But then, maybe we don’t like them — and fear them — because in our heart of hearts we know who the rats of the world really are.

Ranjit Lal is an author, environmentalist and bird watcher. In this column, he will reflect on the eccentricities and absurdities of nature