The Beauty in the Beast by Hugh Warwick

Author:Hugh Warwick [Warwick, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857203977
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

‘A predator hunting on our doorstep’

I had high hopes for owls. My ambassador, my guide, was one of the most articulate and experienced owl experts in the country. As Conservation Officer of the Hawk and Owl Trust, Chris Sperring, MBE, is at the forefront of communicating about these amazing animals. But better than that, it was an obsession for him, one that started when he was a child. Better still, he was the guitarist in a rock band called Raptor.

I met him at his home in Portishead, just outside Bristol, where, after a quick cup of tea, he said, ‘Right, let’s go and find some little owls.’ Clambering up into his 4x4 we bounced off towards what he described as ‘Classic little-owl habitat, absolutely classic’.

There was no mucking about, no beating around the bush, as we sized each other up. Chris is a professional and was feeding me information from the outset.

To begin with, the rock band. I had been hoping to come to a gig or rehearsal, but Raptor had suffered a setback on their sure path to global domination when the drummer moved to Brazil. But Chris was not downhearted. ‘I’m planning something special; recruiting some new musicians,’ he said. ‘It is the Somerset Wildlife Trust’s fiftieth anniversary coming up, and I’m going to take the new band on a county-wide tour, raising money for the charity and raising awareness about the amazing wildlife we have here.’

He pulled the car off the road and jumped out. Grabbing recording gear, cameras and binoculars, I joined him as he strode purposefully towards a small humpback bridge, where he stopped and gazed expansively around and repeated, ‘Classic little-owl habitat.’

I followed his admiring gaze. The view was a little unprepossessing. The bridge on which we stood once carried the road over a railway line, before Beeching’s axe fell and these branch lines were closed in favour of the motorcar. Chris and I stayed close to the bridge wall as cars bombed along the B-road. Across the fields the M5 droned a dirge for the land it had destroyed. Despite the early hour the industrial landscape was already drenched in electric light. ‘Unprepossessing’ was generous.

‘Stop looking at it like a human,’ Chris said. ‘Look at it like a little owl. Think about what the owl needs to survive. This pasture is given over to horses now, and although the fields are a bit bigger than they once were, there are remnants of hedgerow and a few fully mature oaks. The cracks and crevices of an old oak are the ideal places for a little owl to nest. And the horses produce something very special that we in the West Country call S-H-One-T.’

And the reason the outpourings from the horses are so valuable is that they attract little-owl food – beetles and other coprophiliac invertebrates. The little owl is, unsurprisingly, smaller than Britain’s other owls – about half the size of a tawny owl, for example. And they are delightful. I remember, on a

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