My family had had all sorts of suggestions for a name but I stuck to Tal, short for talons, seeing as he had extra large ones. It was a boring name, but I’d thought of it, so there. A couple of weeks passed and Tal started flapping about, seeming to want more space, so I went to the library and got a book out about falconry. There were drawings of various tools of the trade and I copied one of the less ornamental pictures of jesses. A jess is a two-piece leather strap which fits around the bird’s leg, normally to be attached to a training line or the falconer’s glove by means of a swivel. I didn’t have a swivel so I used a key ring, and I didn’t have any leather so I used the canvas from an old plimsoll, and the idea was not training but to give Tal the freedom of our yard on a running line.
He seemed pleased about this and made a certain place on the back wall his own, where he’d sit and watch the world go by, bobbing up and down and turning his head through something like 270 degrees. Celebrity status followed. The coalman, the bin men and the milkman all brought titbits for Tal. My mother, returning from shopping, would find Tal swooping down with a screech to land on her basket, and he wouldn’t let go until she gave him a scrap of chicken or whatever. Everybody in the neighbourhood came to look, and he grew and he grew.
I was grateful for the butcher’s meat but concerned that it wasn’t really the proper thing for an owl whose diet in the wild would mainly be small furry rodents, young birds when there were any, and the occasional frog or fish. They hunt mainly at night, not with especially good eyesight but, as owls do, with exceptional hearing. They’re about ten times better than us at hearing low-frequency sounds, as a little vole might make when moving through the grass, and their ears are not symmetrically placed on their heads, so the very slight differences in each ear’s reception is computed by the brain to give them superior ability to tell where sounds are coming from.
Worms and beetles too are part of the wild diet but when I tried a worm on Tal he gave me a distinctly funny look, as one would if one was used to poulet à la mode and collet d’agneau. And so it was that I became a martyr to a never-ending task.
Each morning I’d be up long before anyone else, slurping a high-speed bowl of cornflakes and trotting the mile and a half to my original wildlifing range, the old railway sidings. I had twelve mousetraps in my system. I set six, usually with a piece of sweet biscuit as bait, and collected the six from the day before. These went into my satchel and the catch into my school-blazer pockets, two, three or sometimes four small rodents, shrews and voles mostly. The traps would have to be cleaned at home that night, and fumigated. Wild rodents will not touch a trap that smells of blood. They sense it, not like house mice. So I used to dangle the traps one at a time on a toasting fork, over the smoke from the coal fire, and that got rid of the taint.
Beyond my trapping grounds was a timber yard, and beyond that a goods railway line from the docks. A train would come along at the same time each day and slow down for a certain junction, allowing me to leap on it and cadge a lift almost all the way to school. If I ran the last half-mile at top speed, I could just slip in before the bell.
My system was hard work but worthwhile, and my predations on the local rodent population seemed to be sustainable. Tal was growing into a feisty adult and a real character but his fame had not, apparently, spread into the masters’ common room at my school. Everybody in my class knew about my trapping except our form teacher, who ordered a search of satchels and pockets after an announcement in assembly about a sudden rush of petty thefts. I was most reluctant to turn out mine, so our master nominated me as prime suspect. Towering over me, he thrust a hand into each side pocket. I can see his face now. Expecting to find someone’s fountain pen or several lots of dinner money, he instead felt something cold, furry and damp.
He felt again, couldn’t believe what his fingers were telling him, so pulled out two dead shrews. Destroying his credibility with that class in one instant, he squealed, went white, dropped the shrews on the floor, and left the room. I picked the bodies up, put them back in my pockets, enjoyed my few minutes as class hero, and looked forward to a search-free summer.
My vole harvest began to thin out. I was, eventually, having the same effects on the small rodents of that part of Hull as the rainforest loggers have on the tree dwellers of the Amazon. Of course I didn’t see it that way. All I could think about was alternative means of supply, which meant ranging further and wider, which meant getting up earlier and earlier and finding myself later and later for school. I was in a difficult position, being permanently skint but needing to buy in. My only option was to trade and, after my deal with Eddie, I had precious little to trade with.
Each week I could pay pennies for road-kill and various things shot by air-gun owners, until the pocket money ran out. After that I only had my museum, a collection of shells and oddities kept in four shoe boxes, which was hardly a big come-on apart from some of the fossils I’d found on trips to Whitby, and my bird’s egg collection.
Being left with nothing forced me to recognise an uncomfortable fact. Tal was from the wild and he needed to go back. If further proof were needed it came one night when I heard another owl answering his calls. Tal was tu-whitting and the other was tu-whooing. Next night I stayed up to watch and saw another tawny on a house roof opposite. To my utter amazement, it flew down and perched beside Tal on our wall, and they carried on calling to each other.
This was in a back street in Hull, with not a tree in sight, and here was a wild female tawny owl trying to get off with the tame male. There was only one way to resolve the matter, and the next time she came to sit on the roof, I released Tal from his bonds. Straight away he flew up to join his mate, and there they were, whitting and whooing on the ridge tiles. Such birds, I knew, mate for life, and would set up a territory somewhere and defend it against other owls, and their young against all-comers.
I thought that would be the last I’d see of them as they flew away, but they were back the next night looking for chicken. I threw what meat I could get, and dead mice, onto the roof and it was three months before they stopped coming.
By the time I was fifteen, nearing school-leaving age, with Tal long gone and my pigeon loft no longer such a fascinating place, Mrs Atkinson in a home and Brian disappeared out of my life, I was like the Cisco Kid without a Pancho. I had a bike, I had a .22 air rifle that I could strap to the crossbar, and every weekend and school holiday to hunt, shoot, fish and look.
On Saturday mornings, my favourite was to bike to Hessle where there was (and still is) a park cum nature reserve called Little Switzerland. There were made paths through the trees and gravelled walks for leisurely strollers but I got right off the beaten track, heading always first for the chalk pits. These were old limestone quarries, a piece of the edge of the Wolds become a set of natural ponds rich in all manner of creatures and plants.
On this particular morning the trees were in their full spring leaf, the sun was bright in a blue sky and my own private wildlife sanctuary was busy. You could sit perfectly still and sense it – optimism, new life, growth, everything dashing about on a mission. I had my gun. I was Langdale of the Jungle, making my way silently across uncharted territory, listening for the crack of a twig which might betray the presence of the deadly Uckawi tribe, headhunters of Hessle and District.
What I did hear was silence; then, striking the air with a purity never found in any orchestra, a song thrush. He ran through his repertoire of single notes, warbles and riffs, then did it all again, and again. I could see him, on a branch of a beech tree, high up, telling me and anyone else within earshot that there was nothing, but nothing, better to do on a fine spring morning in England than to sing his finest song. What happened in the next few seconds is a blank in my mind. I wish the rest of it was a blank too, but it isn’t.
The song stopped and the bird tumbled from the tree. A few tiny feathers floated in the space where he’d been and began their slow zigzag down, in and out of the shafts of sunlight, while their former wearer’s fall was halted in some branches a few feet off the ground. I threw my gun aside and swiftly made the few steps to the beech tree. As I reached it, the gods of the forest shook those branches and the dead thrush dropped at my feet.
I looked at it. I could see one eye half closed.