RSPB be damned. Where's my gun?
We acquired, for about 48 hours, an eagle owl. As soon as it arrived Paddy Paws the fat ginger cat disappeared. Now if you were a ginger cat and a thing the size of a microlight came swooping through the trees, blotting out the moon, you too would ma
ke yourself scarce.
Eagle owls are seriously big, with a wingspan anything up to seven feet. Eagle owls have a bad name and while I cannot be certain that ginger cats are specifically mentioned in the literature as standard provender for eagle owls, cats are certainly the right sort of size; somewhere between a small rabbit and a hare and certainly smaller than a roe deer, which they are also alleged to attack.
So you can imagine that the appearance of the eagle owl and the disappearance of the fat cat all at the same time caused something of a hiatus hereabouts; a lot of poking about in bushes, telephoning neighbours and plaintive calling in the darkness.
And all the time bubo bubo watched inscrutably from his perch, high in the chestnut tree at the end of the garden ...
The owl had come crashing out of a holly bush as I went to empty the compost bucket in my dressing gown. It was about ten yards away and believe me, at 10am on a Sunday morning this sort of thing makes quite an impression.
It flew about 50 yards across the walled garden, climbed steeply and took up position in the chestnut tree and, rather rudely I thought, turned its back on us to look the opposite way down across the burn towards the two Gloucester Old Spots the neighbour has become so fond of he refuses to kill.
From time to time the owl swivelled his head in that way owls do, without moving any part of his body, and looked cross. We spent quite a long time looking at him but he didn't do anything and I have to confess I became rather bored and went to get the papers.
When I came back he had taken up a position in a Portuguese laurel and all the jackdaws and rooks were going berserk with fright.
Paddy, who tends to patrol the area exactly below where the owl first roosted, has not been seen since.
There was a suggestion that the owl might look quite good stuffed. He was an easy .22 shot. Even the RSPB has reservations over claiming eagle owls were once native to these islands. I suspect that they don't really want to have to speak up on behalf of a bird that eats cats and snatches babies from pushchairs.
But there is precious little room in the freezer, where it would have to be stored until a taxidermist could be found. So probably not a good idea.
Paddy was called Paddy Paws because he had an extra claw, like a thumb, on each paw. He never caught a mouse in his life. In fact he had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning. Perhaps he will reappear, like Squirrel Nutkin, minus his tail.
We think bubo bubo is an escapee. There have been several attempts to catch it by the local falconry centre, who say it is not theirs.
But it has clearly developed a taste for wild living and has learned to survive. And did you know ... an eagle owl was the family pet of the Malfoys in Harry Potter?
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