The Company Of Owls by Polly Atkin: A love letter to Owls
The Company Of Owls by Polly Atkin (Elliott and Thompson £16.99, 224pp)
Polly Atkin identifies as an owl. No, not in the slightly loopy way that so-called ‘furries’ do, dressing up in animal costumes because they feel they are, inwardly, hamsters, but in the sense that she feels a profound affinity with them.
Like owls, she says, with their routine of ‘nighthunt and dayrest’, she is most awake and alert at night, when she loves to walk in the countryside; due to unusual hyper-mobility, she can also turn her head a very long way round and look behind her.
But she’s wryly aware this parallel shouldn’t be taken too far. She can’t fly, and ‘I don’t have the ability to form my indigestible consumed matter into a pellet and hack it back up.’
The result of this affinity is her beautifully written and densely observant book The Company Of Owls, which she calls a nocturnal love song to the owls that surround her Lake District home.
In the tall trees near her house in Grasmere lives a family of tawny owls, also known as brown owls. The writings of Dorothy and William Wordsworth describe hearing tawny owls hooting, in 1802, in exactly the same place they still hoot today.
Atkin covers other species too, including the rapidly spreading Little Owl, a small but hilariously fierce character with its indignant squeak and ferocious glare at anyone who dares even look at it too closely.
They first arrived from Rome in 1843, brought here by the fabulously eccentric animal-lover Charles Waterton (who once captured a cayman by jumping on its back and tying its jaws shut with his braces).
Owls have always been seen as creatures of the dark, harbingers of death, yet also renowned for their ‘wisdom, insight, discernment’. Atkin adores their quiet, half-hidden lives, so like her own.
The Little Owl: a hilariously fierce character with its indignant squeak and ferocious glare at anyone who dares even look at it too closely.
This book is something of a self-portrait. ‘Sometimes I am so aware of my onlyhood, my apartness, I feel it like a shell around me.’
She explains that, through a genetic quirk, she inhabits a ‘hyper-sensitive, hyper-aware, hyper-flexible Ehlers-Danlos body,’ the Ehlers-Danlos referring to a rare genetic disorder that causes these mixed blessings, as it affects the body’s connective tissues.
‘I feel like I need a hard shell to move through the human world,’ she confesses, while others perhaps move through that bright, busy world so easily because they have less awareness and sensitivity.
The book is both about owls, then, and a certain kind of human owlishness in more introverted people.
We learn many wonderful things about owls themselves, though, not least the revelation that if you find a young owl, an owlet, out of the nest and on the ground and unable to fly, leave it alone.
It’s natural: they leave the nest before their wings are fully grown. It seems that an owlet’s craving for the sunshine, and for getting out to explore the great world beyond the nest, is more powerful than any fear of not being able to fly yet. Technically this behaviour is called ‘branching’.
The Company Of Owls is also a love letter to Polly Atkin’s Lake District, where tea shops can shut at 3pm because of staff shortages, to the great irritation of tourists.
So many people have moved in and bought second homes that they use only at weekends, or even just in school holidays, that lower-income locals – the kind of people who work in tea shops – can no longer afford to live there. There is much food for thought in this wonderful and wholly original book about owls.