Barn Owl by Jim Crumley

Author:Jim Crumley [Jim Crumley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781908643742
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2014-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

THREE

THE POSSIBILITIES OF broken-open tree trunks were the barn owl’s first resort for nest sites, as now (after centuries of dependency on the cast-off buildings of the people, and a few decades of woodland edge nest boxes) they are still an option and in some places the preferred option. Here is a quiet corner of the foothills of the southmost Highlands, with a badger sett at its heart. The sett is flanked by yet another hill burn (badgers insist on the proximity of water) contained between two more crumbling dykes and one dilapidated fence, all of which the badgers cross with ease. Beyond these is a swooping grass field with trees on three sides.

The badger knows the barn owl. They are kindred spirits of the half-light and the dark, and like the barn owl, the badger can also unleash upon the most profound night silence a scream to freeze the blood of every creature of woodland and field, hillside and moor and clifftop, and for that matter of every badger-and-owl-watcher. Badger and barn owl are also both occasional, reluctant daylight travellers, reluctant because in daylight they lose most of the advantages that nature has bestowed on them. They meet all the time as they patrol their territory, and less often inside woodland than outside it, ships that pass in the night fields, mostly without so much as a nod of recognition. This very corner of the Trossachs is the only place where I have ever seen them meet head on, or to be more accurate, I did not see the actual meeting but rather the immediate aftermath of the meeting.

I was watching a badger sett on a beautiful evening of late May. The usual cast of bit-part players strolled on and off stage delivering their lines flawlessly – roebuck, robin, woodcock, with noises off from cuckoo and drumming snipe – but by 10pm I had not seen a single badger. It happens. Even at the busiest badger setts there are inexplicable blank nights, inexplicable to the badger-watcher that is. It does not mean that no badgers have emerged, only that you have not seen them emerge. On the night in question I decided to give it one more hour, just in case, although I was in a mood of rare pessimism about my chances.

I was also uncomfortable (uncomfortable, that is, by the standards of badger watching in a truly wild landscape, which is not a pursuit for the faint-hearted or the lap-of-luxury-dweller). The wind was from an unusual airt and that ruled out the best vantage point. Instead I was stuck with a fallen beech trunk. It was okay to sit on except that sitting on it offered no view of the sett. Standing on it I could see some of the sett but it was a precarious stance with only flimsy surviving branches for hand-holds. I was standing by the beech, leaning on its fallen trunk and weighing the options when I saw one of the badger cubs squeeze under the fence and pad along beside the burn.

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