“It was odd how much I loved you.”) In Liverpool, there are reputed to be drug dealers who – can this really be true? – use eagle owls for protection rather than dogs.īut to get to these jewels you must struggle through an awful lot of padding. (“Poor little beastie,” she remarked, when she heard. Florence Nightingale, for instance, kept a little owl called Athena as a pet, until she was called to Crimea, at which point the abandoned bird was left to starve in her attic back at home. Owl Sense bulges with alarming facts and figures – thanks largely to changes in habitats, there are now fewer than 5,000 pairs of barn owls in the UK – and with some pretty good and weird owl stories, too. The scene in which she invites a taxidermist round to deal with a dead tawny she has been keeping in her freezer – before you panic, she found it while out walking – is wonderful (“the colour remains imprinted on my retina: indecent, purplish-red, rich as heartwood”). Of course she writes about the owls superbly well, and her book comes complete with some fine set pieces. Delightful though her enthusiasm is, it seems worked up somehow: in the service of needing to complete a book rather than the flame that fired the project in the first place. How long has Darlington been obsessed with owls? She doesn’t quite say, and perhaps this is one reason why at times – usually when there’s no sharp beak in sight – her narrative feels rather effortful. The eagle owl requires a trip to Finland, and the long-eared owl to Serbia still on her list even now are the snowy owl, the hawk owl, and the great grey owl. The tawny owl, as we’ve seen, is fairly easily ticked off so too are the barn owl and the little owl (and what gorgeous goblins they are, at just a few inches high). Owl Sense is on similar territory: there are 13 species of native owl in Europe, and in her book she sets out to try to see them all in the wild, with varying results. This was the tawny owl he had been training, here to pick up its dinner of chopped day-old chicks.ĭarlington’s much-loved first book, published in 2012, was about otters, animals she crossed Britain to track, meeting along the way all manner of conservationists, ecologists and poets. A moment later, a “swooping shadow” appeared, “suspended on a loop of air as if there was a cushion between his wings and the ground”. It would, he’d promised, yield results in the end – and he was right. Her friend Stephen had told her to keep at this whistling.

Through the treetops, she could see the rising moon and a flitting bat, sights that were soundtracked by birdsong (thrushes, blackbirds, rasping rooks) and her own small contribution: an inexpert whistle. O ne darkish evening not so long ago, the nature writer Miriam Darlington stood in a wood somewhere in Devon, her feet buried in wild garlic, her nose filled with the scents of mulch and moss.

Don't Forget I Love You by Miriam Moss