Animals fascinate me. I picked up Martin Windrow’s The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar: Living with a Tawny Owl at a used book sale. Honestly, the cute photo on the cover swayed me. Although some animals like living with humans, and although I grew up with lots of pets, I’ve tended away from that. Reading about how an owl became a close companion to, and lived a good life with a human was somewhat bittersweet. In the wild Mumble (the owl’s name) would’ve likely lived a far shorter span. But I do wonder if she missed out on the challenges that make life rewarding. (I sometimes wonder the same about those born rich among our own species.) The struggle is part of nature inside us. And although this book is generally fun, it does raise some deeper questions in my mind.
When describing the natural life of Tawny Owls, Windrow notes that they have an ability, not understood, to adjust their brood sizes by the amount of prey that will be available during a given year. Such things always give me pause for a couple of reasons. One is that we seem to assume we have all the data—that we know all that can be known of our world. Animals prove that wrong time and again. The other reason is that we are convinced there is no, for lack of a better term, spiritual world. Or maybe better, paranormal existence. Might it not be that owls have some ability to know the future? Some people seem to have the ability to predict some short-term developments with accuracy. Perhaps we’re missing something is all I’m saying.
In the end, however, I was surprised how Windrow couldn’t quite bring himself to reject a materialist view of her death. I’ve had pets die on me—one of the reasons that I have no desire to “own” one—but as Windrow writes it, the relationship grew humdrum before Mumble’s death. He had to work and she had to perch. We do tend to take those closest to us for granted, I fear. Life is so busy that we have to try to squeeze family in next to the demands of capitalism. So the story towards the end winds down to a kind of “I had a pet owl but I had a life to live too” kind of narrative. I’m glad to have read the book and I learned a little bit about Tawny Owls. But I was also left reflecting on some of the larger implications.
