Athens, the seat of learned fame,
With general voice revered our name;
On merit title was conferred,
And all adored the Athenian bird.
. . . But now, alas! we’re quite neglected,
And a pert sparrow’s more respected.
A sparrow, overhearing this nostalgic moaning, roundly attacks the old owls with the criticism that birds have now learned that looks can be misleading and that just because the owls happen to appear wise and venerable does not necessarily mean that they are so. He goes on to say that if they concentrate on what they are good at, namely catching mice, the farmers will applaud them and they will gain true respect for the labours rather than false respect for their looks.
Another fable popular in the eighteenth century concerned a vain young owl who felt that he was so handsome that only the daughter of an eagle would do for his bride. When he heard of this, the eagle treated the suggestion with scorn but said that he would give his consent if the owl would meet him the following day, at sunrise, high in the sky. The conceited young owl agreed to do this but when the time came found himself so dazzled by the bright rays of the morning sun that he became dizzy and fell to the ground, landing on some rocks where he was promptly mobbed by angry daytime birds. The moral of this fable is that ambition without talent ends in disgrace.
A nineteenth-century Russian fable tells of a blind donkey that has become caught up in a thicket and cannot escape. It is night-time and a helpful owl guides the donkey to safety. The donkey is so grateful that it begs the owl to accompany it everywhere. The owl agrees and enjoys the luxury of sitting on the donkey’s back, but then daylight comes and the owl cannot see clearly where they are going. It misdirects the donkey and together they fall into a ravine. Again this tale focuses on the owl’s limited skills and the moral is that because someone is brilliant at one thing it does not mean that they will be good at another.
This theme of the owl being wonderful only at night is taken up again in a poem entitled simply ‘The Owl’ by the English Victorian poet Bryan Waller Procter (1787–1874), who wrote under the name of Barry Cornwall. A shortened version reads:
In the hollow tree, in the grey old tower,
The spectral owl doth dwell;
Dull, hated, despised in the sunshine hour,
But at dusk – he’s abroad and well.
Not a bird of the forest e’er mates with him;
All mock him outright by day,
But at night, when the woods grow still and dim,
The boldest will shrink away.
Oh, when the night falls, and roosts the fowl,
Then, then is the reign of the horn-ed owl!
Oh, when the moon shines and the dogs do howl,
Then, then is the cry of the horn-ed owl!
Mourn not for the owl nor his gloomy plight!
The owl hath his share of good;
If a prisoner he be in the broad daylight,
He is lord in the dark green wood.
So when the night falls and dogs do howl,
Sing ho for the reign of the horned owl!
We know not alway who are kings by day,
But the king of the night is the bold brown owl.
Apart from Pablo Picasso, few famous people appear to have kept an owl as a pet. This is not surprising as they are highly unsuitable as household companions unless you happen to live in a barn overrun with rodents. Even then, an owl will not usually find it easy to accept the close attentions of human companions. One of the few exceptions to this general rule concerns the famous British nurse Florence Nightingale. She was visiting the Parthenon in Athens in June 1850, where little owls commonly nested, when she saw, to her horror, a baby owl being tormented by a group of Greek children. It had fallen from its nest and was clearly in need of the nursing skills for which Florence was to become so well known. She rescued it, named it Athena after the Greek goddess, and learned how to feed it. The hatchling was so young that it developed an unusually strong bond of attachment with the ‘lady with the lamp’ and became her devoted friend, so much so that it would sit on her finger to be fed and was trained to enter a cage at her request. After a while, Athena became such an intimate companion that it accompanied Florence Nightingale wherever she went, travelling snugly in her pocket. The bird soon became famous as her trademark, and was notorious for attacking visitors with its sharp beak if approached too closely. But in 1855, when Florence was deeply involved with the preparations for her wartime nursing duties in the Crimea, her family decided to leave the little bird in the attic for a while, thinking that it would be able to rid the place of its infestation of mice. Unfortunately the owl had become so tame that it simply sat and waited for its next meal to be served. When nothing arrived it eventually starved to death on the very day that Florence was due to leave for the war.
When she discovered what had happened to her beloved pet Florence was so devastated that she delayed her departure for two days so that she could make arrangements for the owl to be expertly embalmed. Athena’s body was sent to a taxidermist in London and was carefully mounted in a lifelike pose. After this, it remained in Florence’s house, a constant if now somewhat unresponsive companion, until her own death in 1910. It then passed through several hands, until in 2004 enough money could be raised to purchase it as a permanent exhibit for the Florence Nightingale Museum at St Thomas Hospital in London, where it remains to this day.
The owl with others listens to the mouse, in John Tenniel’s woodcut illustration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).
One of the strangest nineteenth-century literary offerings concerning an owl must surely be Lady Verney’s Life and Death of Athena, an Owlet from the Parthenon, privately published in 1855 as a special gift for Florence Nightingale, her sister.1 A copy of the short book was sent to Florence at the front in the Crimea war zone, to cheer her up when she was suffering from a bad fever. According to her sister the only tears that Florence shed during the chaotic week of her delayed departure were as the little body of the dead owl was put into her hands. ‘Poor little beastie’, she is reputed to have said, ‘it was odd how I loved you.’
When Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, one might have expected an owl to play a special role in this animal-rich fantasy, but sadly it only makes a silent appearance in one of John Tenniel’s classic illustrations.2 When a self-important mouse is giving a dry lecture to a wet audience, his listeners include a bored owl with its eyes screwed tight shut. At the point where Alice, lacking tact, mentions the bird-hunting skills of her pet cat, all the birds in the group make their excuses and leave, and that is the last we see of the Wonderland owl.
Also in the nineteenth century Edward Lear’s nonsense verses gained enormous popularity for their quirky charm. They lived up to their name, being utter nonsense with no morals to offer at their conclusions. His very first nonsense song (1867) was called ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ and it introduced another kind of owl altogether. Neither evil nor wise, pompous nor vain, Lear’s bird has little of the traditional owl about it. The first verse reads:
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!’
In the remaining verses the owl and the cat get married, enjoy a feast and finally, as befits two nocturnal predators, dance in the light of the moon. There is no moral and no reference to the owl’s special features, either biological or mythological. This is self-proclaimed nonsense verse and was written simply to cheer up a sick child, Janet Symonds, the daughter of Lear’s friends. Desp
ite this, Lear’s bird remains one of the best known of all fictional owls.
‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, a drawing by Edward Lear for his Nonsense Verse (1871).
Edward Lear’s fondness for owls is apparent from the number of times he includes one in his drawings and sketches. Another well-known example is his 1846 cartoon of his beard. Lear had a very large beard and amused children by suggesting that it was so big that, if they looked closely, they would find birds nesting in it. To accompany the cartoon, he wrote:
It is just as I feared!
Two owls & a hen,
Four larks & a wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!
‘Owls in a Beard’, a drawing of 1846 by Edward Lear (1812–88).
In A. A. Milne’s much loved children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh, published in 1926, an owl, who spelled himself WOL, was clearly a descendent of the wise Athenian owl. There was no trace in WOL’s personality of the spooky owl of witchcraft and doom. This was a gentle, respected owl, who lived in a hollow tree in ‘an old-world residence of great charm, which was grander than anybody else’s’, with a front door that boasted both a knocker and a bell-pull. He was a friendly sage who was consulted on difficult questions, and who offered thoughtful advice using longer and longer words that were too difficult for a mere bear to understand. But he meant well and, for Milne’s young readers, introduced the idea of an owl as a helpful, learned and slightly grandparental figure.
The American humourist James Thurber was famous for the primitive, childlike drawings with which he illustrated his writings. Their spontaneity gave them a charm that would have been lost had he tried to improve his technique. On one occasion when he did attempt to do this, he was warned by a colleague that ‘If ever you got good you’d be mediocre.’ His most famous owl drawing avoids this. Called ‘The Owl who was God’ it was drawn to accompany a typically bizarre Thurber fable. Although it borrows something from the tale of ‘The Owl’s Coronation’ from the third-century Panchatantra, Thurber makes the story very much his own. It can be summarized as follows:
One starless night two moles are accosted by an owl. Astonished that he can detect them even in the pitch darkness, they hurry to tell the other animals of his great wisdom. A secretary bird decides to test this and asks the owl for another expression for the word ‘namely’. ‘To wit’ says the owl. ‘And why does a lover call on his love?’ asks the secretary bird. ‘To woo’ says the owl. Deeply impressed by the owl’s extensive knowledge, the secretary bird tells all the other animals. They decide that the owl must be God and they follow him everywhere he goes. They even follow him when, at high noon, he starts walking down the middle of a highway. Because he cannot see in the bright sunlight he does not notice a truck approaching and is killed along with many of his gullible followers.
Thurber’s typically whimsical moral was: ‘You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.’
In the literature of the twenty-first century the only author to feature owls in an important fictional context is J. K. Rowling. In her brilliant popular revival of the rather tired subject of witchcraft – the Harry Potter series published between 1997 and 2007 – she enlists a variety of owls to act as messengers between her magical world and the ordinary world of ‘muggles’. Harry Potter himself has a female snowy owl called Hedwig. In the films based on the books Hedwig is played by seven different male birds: Gizmo, Kasper, Oops, Swoops, Oh-Oh, Elmo and Bandit. They are all males because male snowy owls are smaller than females and therefore easier for a young actor to handle and there are seven of them because, apparently, professional owls have their off-days and stand-ins are frequently needed. Harry’s friend Ron has a Eurasian pygmy owl called Pigwidgeon, or Pig for short. There are several other owls in the books, including a huge Eurasian eagle owl, owned by the Malfoy family, and Errol, an elderly male great grey owl, belonging to the Weasley family, who is extremely clumsy and keeps crashing into things when trying to land. We are assured that all violent accidents were the work of a dummy, stunt owl.
It would be easy to argue that it is a shame to see these beautiful owls once again being dragged back into the superstitious, supernatural world of witches and curses that should have vanished centuries ago, but the saving grace of the Harry Potter stories is that they are clearly meant to be read purely as children’s fairy stories and not to be taken seriously. So no damage is done. Or, as they say in all Hollywood credits these days, no birds were harmed during the making of these films.
7 Tribal Owls
All over the world there are tribal legends and superstitions about owls, stories that have managed to survive into the twenty-first century. In some cases the tribes involved are still stubbornly clinging on to their traditional way of life but, even where they are adapting to a more modern lifestyle, the old tales of wise owls and witch’s owls are still told.
Even in modern Europe, where the ancient tribes have long ago merged into larger nations, one only has to go out into the more remote rural districts to find owl myths and rituals operating at an almost medieval level, with the old beliefs refusing to die away. In Transylvania, for example, farmers in some regions still believe that walking around their fields naked will scare away owls. In Wales if an owl is heard calling among the houses it means that an unmarried girl has lost her virginity. In Russia some hunters carry a lucky charm in the form of owl claws so that, if they are killed, their souls can use the claws to climb up to heaven. In Poland if a married woman dies she will turn into an owl. In France if a pregnant woman hears an owl, she will give birth to a girl. Also in France, in Bordeaux, you must throw salt on the fire to avoid the owl’s curse. On the other hand, in Brittany an owl seen at harvest time means that there will be a good yield. In Germany if an owl hoots as a child is born, the infant will experience an unhappy life. In Ireland if an owl enters the house it must be killed or it will take the luck of the house with it when it leaves. And in Spain there is a legend that the owl used to sing sweetly until it saw Jesus die on the cross, after which it would only cry cruz cruz (cross cross).
If a careful, country-by-country survey were to be made, this list of surviving owl superstitions would undoubtedly fill many pages. Of course European city-dwellers would laugh at them, but country folk will have heard one or another of them, even today. Most will scoff at them and laugh at the suggestion that they have any basis in fact but even if they are only regarded as fanciful nonsense their retelling keeps them alive as part of local folklore.
Europe may have relegated many of its old myths and legends to the level of mere fairy tales, but in other parts of the world, stories about owls continue to be taken seriously and nowhere is this more true than on the still largely tribal continent of Africa.
AFRICAN OWLS
Owls do not fare well in the mythology of African tribes, where they are generally believed to be evil. In many places they are associated with witchcraft and killed whenever possible. The standard pidgin English name for the owl in West Africa is Witchbird. In parts of Cameroon the owl is considered to be so evil that it is forbidden to give it a name and it is known there only as the bird that makes you afraid. There, and also in parts of Nigeria, witches are reputed to transform themselves into owls at night.
In Zimbabwe it is the barn owl that is said to be the Witch’s Bird. When asked why this species in particular was singled out a local ornithologist replied ‘because it is white’. They are considered to be bad luck and are killed whenever possible. Local witch doctors then use their beaks and claws to make powerful medicines that they use to cause harm. In Namibia the Balozi tribe believe that, simply by their presence, owls bring disease. As a result whenever owls enter a village they are shot. The Kikuyu in Kenya believe that, if an owl appears a death will follow.
African Kifwebe owl mask, by an artist of the Songye tribe, Congo.
This negative attitude to owls in Africa has played havoc with Western attempts to conserve some of the rare species, such
as the Congo Bay owl. Culturally naïve conservationists who fail to understand local superstitions have little chance of introducing effective protection measures for these endangered birds.
The ability of the owl to see in the dark has, however, impressed African medicine men sufficiently for them to recommend eating owls’ eyes to improve the night vision of human hunters or warriors.
Among the Kuba, a tribe from the Democratic Republic of Congo, status is displayed by the kind of hat worn on special occasions. Hats worn by the tribal chiefs are decorated with feathers. The highest official is the Eagle Feather Chief because eagles are considered to be the most powerful birds in the daytime sky. Next to him in importance comes the Chief of the Initiation Society, who wears an owl feather because owls are thought to be the rulers of the forest and the night sky. The Kuba also make expressive owl masks, depicting the birds with huge eyes, a sharp pointed beak and short, pricked ear-tufts.
Owl with Child, carved by an artist of the Chockwe tribe, Angola. 20th century, wood. The Chokwe consider the owl to be a wise creature that has great knowledge acquired in the wild. This figure symbolizes how the ancestral spirits offer protection to future generations.
The Songye tribe of the Congo also carve dramatic owl masks for special ceremonies. Theirs are usually painted a vivid black and white, with an oddly upturned mouth. They are very heavy to wear and the visibility from them is minimal, the dancer’s vision being restricted to what he can see from two narrow slits just below the large, rounded owl-eyes.
Among the Chockwe of Angola the owl is considered a wise creature that has great knowledge acquired in the wild. Ancestral figures are sometimes shown with a human body and the head of an owl, and are depicted in a protective role, caring for future generations.
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