The weight of winter cloud seemed to leave the whole landscape slumped in grey, but there was no hint of dullness to the morning. Among the pigeons and partridges and flights of finches were six marsh harriers, five kestrels and two owls. The predators were evenly spread, quartering the marsh or perched aloft and intent, so that I could hardly look in any direction without some returning sense of electric attention. They all seemed to be after voles and, in fact, I saw a kestrel and harrier each take one in turn, while a young heron, neck and beak poised over the field like some ritual dagger, was stalking the same sort of prey. Of them all, however, the hunting short-eared owls were most wonderful.
The owl’s long wings were pale buff below, chequered ash-brown above. Their full span levered up and down rhythmically, but the upstroke was whipped so high and hard it installed a brief vacuum beneath each arm, then down softly on to that displaced air settled the downstroke. Over and over, with adjusting tilts to left and right, or when it came clean around to come straight at me in long level glides, the bird attacked the same lens of air just above the grasses.
The action was so fluent it seemed automated and strangely at odds with the rest of the organism. For behind those wings, trailing like a loose rudder, were the buff-stockinged feet, while ahead of everything rode the head. It was fixed to a body via an enormous neck whose thickly feathered hood created an encircling bulge about the entire upper body and looked a fulcrum for the whole sweet mechanism.
All its fine-tuned kinetics were ultimately at the service of two immense yellow eyes centred in a flattened facial disc. They were ringed in black and beamed down upon the grasses, on to which the bird intermittently collapsed like old clothes. Then the head would rotate back and forth, the eyes swivelling everywhere, and just occasionally I was swallowed too and an owl’s brain drank me down, so that for those moments I was more than an observer to this hunter’s morning.
