How I fell in love with an owl: She wasn't the ideal pet to keep in a London flat. But Mumble stole MARTIN WINDROW'S heart - and she'll steal yours too!



Shaving is tricky with an owl on your shoulder. As I work on the right side of my throat, Mumble makes darting, snake-like passes with her beak at the handle of the razor as it reaches the top of each stroke.

When I move over to the other side of my face, she reaches over to peck a few clumps of foam from my neck.

Only rarely does she remember that she can’t stand the taste. After a few impatient clicks of her beak she gives a little sneeze (snit!). Shaving foam flies in all directions. Owl and man are an unseemly tangle of wet hair, soap and feathers.



Tame, friendly and sociable, Mumble was content from the moment she arrived simply to get on with what baby owls do best: exploring

We are both on autopilot this morning — but we manage. So well, in fact, that these days I hardly notice the bizarre adjustments I’ve made to my life in the three years since we met.

Quite what made me decide, in my mid-30s, to get a pet for the first time — and an owl at that — is a fair question. But the blame must partly be laid, I think, at the door of my elder brother Dick, a falconry expert.

Watching him handle and train a succession of majestic hawks, kestrels and buzzards, I found it impossible not to become intrigued. A dream of owning such a beautiful creature took hold.

When my brother told me that a friend of his was a licensed breeder of birds of prey, what could I do? I lived in a high-rise flat in South London, so a falcon or a hawk, which needs to soar high in the sky, was out of the question. But there was another option . . .

I placed an order for a tawny owl.

They say love at first sight hits you hard when it hits you late. And so it was with me. I arrived at Dick’s Kent farmhouse a month later to collect my new pet. Dick directed me to the kitchen.

Perched on the back of a sunlit chair by the open window was something about 9in tall and shaped rather like a plump toy penguin. It appeared to be wearing a one-piece knitted jumpsuit of pale grey fluff with brown stitching.



Mumble would be clambering in the dark from shoulder to shoulder of the coats and jackets hanging there until she reached the very deepest corner

Two big, shiny black eyes gazed up at me trustfully. ‘Kweep,’ it said quietly. I leaned a little closer. It blinked its furry grey eyelids, then jumped very deliberately on to my right shoulder.

It felt like a big, warm dandelion head against my check, and it smelled like a milky new kitten. ‘Kweep,’ it repeated, very softly. That night we drove back to London together. The owlet started the journey in a cardboard box, but soon escaped and climbed up to my shoulder.

By the time we were halfway home my new friend had learned to lean into the corners for balance, occasionally taking a delicate beak grip on the rim of my ear to steady itself. This was clearly no ordinary owl.

I was smitten, and would remain so for the next 15 years.

My idea had been to give Mumble the run of the flat as much as possible. For the times when this wasn’t practical I’d rigged up a large, sheltered outdoor cage on the balcony, and a smaller indoor one in the kitchen. I’d been warned that you can’t house-train an owl, and that a certain amount of fall-out, shall we say, was all part of the price I’d have to pay for sharing my life with such a glorious creature (a fridge full of dead chicks was another).



Mostly Mumble was docile and affectionate, and in this mood she enjoyed being preened

So I set to work covering the floor around her most obvious perches — the tops of half-open doors, a flower pot stand, my wardrobe — with thick layers of newspaper. I also taped a good many plastic sheets around the place and covered up the furniture. It was going to be a demanding routine.

To my relief, though, Mumble appeared as happy in my flat and in my company as she’d been in the car on the way home. Tame, friendly and sociable, she was content from the moment she arrived simply to get on with what baby owls do best: exploring.

If I left a carrier bag or cardboard box lying around, she was into it. The sliding doors of my wardrobe were an even greater temptation, even if open just a tiny crack. I’d hear a croon or — after the first couple of weeks — a fluting war whoop ‘w-o-o-o-o, w-o-o-o-o, w-o-o-o-o’ from within.

Mumble would be clambering in the dark from shoulder to shoulder of the coats and jackets hanging there until she reached the very deepest corner.

It would be some weeks before Mumble would learn to fly, but in the meantime she had devised her own way of getting round my flat via a series of long, expertly executed jumps.



Mumble's morning patrol of the flat involved short flights from chair backs to door tops, then down to the living-room floor for a walk in front of the floor-length window

At just four weeks old, she could make a single leap from the back of my armchair, out through the living room door across the end of the hallway, through the open kitchen door opposite and on to the kitchen table — an impressive 12ft at least, all without touching the ground.

She was also able, even at this early stage, to propel herself from any convenient bit of furniture up to the top of the open living room door, her favourite daytime perch. From there she had an unobstructed view of the whole room and of the distant world outside.

To get down again Mumble would wait till I walked past the door and then would simply lean forwards and roll confidently off into space, perhaps giving a tiny experimental flap of her wings and dropping on to my shoulder with a little squeak.

By the time she was three months old, my new flatmate’s flying was progressing.

Take-offs and point-to-point flights came easily to Mumble.

From a solid perch she sprang into the air by the power of her flexed legs, gave one downstroke of her spreading wings and immediately achieved flying speed, the large size of her wings compared with her weight giving her effortlessly buoyant flight.



Mumble occasionally took a short stroll on a glass-topped bookshelf, clicking along with a gingerly gait as if walking on ice

It was a long while, though, before her landings improved beyond the — frankly — lamentable. Her incompetence was most obvious when she forgot (as she often did) her previous experiences of ‘ice landings’ on my long marble coffee table.

She would make her approach far too fast and at far too shallow an angle, and when she touched down she simply skidded across it with her feet flailing vainly for traction, her wings beating wildly, and her tail fanning out awkwardly in all directions.

Mumble would invariably disappear off the far side in an ungainly cartwheel of claws and feathers. She seemed to find my helpless laughter on these occasions irritating (one can take umbrage so much more convincingly when one has a lot of feathers).

But mostly she was docile and affectionate, and in this mood she enjoyed being preened.

When she was sitting close I would stroke the top of her head gently with my fingers while she nuzzled my beard with her beak. I was not expecting gestures of friendship from Mumble, and it came as a pleasant, and humbling, surprise when she started initiating such preening sessions herself. These most often happened when she saw me first thing in the morning.



If something outside the window caught her attention, especially a pigeon, she'd spring into action, extending her legs like a chicken's and making a bobbing run beside the glass

Although the shower rail was her favourite night-time perch, she normally wandered off when I turned the water on, for which I was grateful. (It was occasions when I had no clothes on that my eyes were most drawn to her fearsome talons).

But when the sound of the water stopped and I was back in my bedroom getting dressed, I would hear a questioning croon, and her face would appear, wide-eyed with interest, round the bottom of the door.

She’d advance across the floor in two or three great leaps, half-open wings fanning slowly, until she reached my knee.

Then she would hop up, shuffle along my thigh until she was beneath my chin, arrange herself neatly, give another croon or two, and lift her face towards mine with her beak half-open.

When I gave in and started stroking her head, she’d sink down on her undercarriage and puff out her body feathers, retracting her head until she looked rather like a single fluffy ball with a set of features on its top surface.

To let me know that the session was over, she’d shake herself vigorously and jump up to my shoulder to look around brightly for new amusements. This was my permission to move.

Mumble’s morning patrol of my flat involved short flights from chair backs to door tops, then down to the living-room floor for a walk in front of the floor-length window, then up to a bookshelf, out into the darkened hallway to the telephone table and back to my chair.



Mumble at about 11 weeks old. Even as Mumble approached her 15th birthday she was not visibly ageing in either appearance or behaviour

She occasionally took a short stroll on a glass-topped bookshelf, clicking along with a gingerly gait as if walking on ice. Infrequently, a hollow echo of this same ‘gunfighter with spurs’ sound betrayed the fact that she had flown down into the empty bath and was stomping up and down there.

If something outside the window caught her attention, especially a pigeon, she’d spring into action, extending her legs like a chicken’s and making a bobbing run beside the glass, balancing herself with wings billowing half-open like a pantomime villain’s cloak. This was an owl — and by now an increasingly territorial one — with whom you would definitely not want to tangle.

Although I’d determined never to let her into my study, in a weak moment one day I let her in, partly because it was so fascinating watching her doing something new.

Mumble enriched Martin's life in a way he could never have imagined possible

It was my manual typewriter, with its intriguing clicking noises that was, I discovered, the attraction for Mumble. The first time she caught sight of it she approached it silently from behind before hurling herself into the machine talons first and with wings upraised, as if she were jumping into a potted plant (another favourite game of hers).

I’m a fairly fast typist, so when she arrived at speed in the central well of the machine she got a couple of key-taps under the tail before I could react and stop.



Finding this intolerable — especially as she was trying to bite the paper at the time — things got a bit flappy and indignant.

But we got the hang of it in the end. I kept on typing, while Mumble discovered that she enjoyed riding the carriage on its right-to-left journey. Every time I slammed the carriage back to the right she’d jump up and hover for half a second before descending again for her next ride.

When Mumble was three years old I decided that both she and I’d had enough of city life. I sold my flat and bought us a cottage in Sussex.

There, I was able to construct a huge outdoor aviary where she could catch her own prey and forage in the grass that grew inside it.

In time she became quite a celebrity in the area, and a great favourite with the village schoolchildren, who would peer through the garden fence trying to look at her.

On these occasions I’d get their parents to ring and arrange a time for them all to come and meet Mumble properly next to her pen, complete with my induction lecture on tawny owls.

Our years in Sussex rolled by, but even as Mumble approached her 15th birthday she was not visibly ageing in either appearance or behaviour. There seemed no reason to suppose that she couldn’t have a fair crack at the record of the longest-lived tawny owl in captivity: 27 years.



Until a terrible morning when I went outside to say goodbye before work to find her aviary door standing wide open.

There was no padlock (what a complacent idiot I was), but the door had a strong catch that neither the strongest wind nor any animal could open. There was no sign of Mumble.

This was an owl - and by now an increasingly territorial one - with whom you would definitely not want to tangle

I had noticed in the local newspaper that an animal rights group had publicised this as a week of action, and a horrible suspicion began to form in my mind.

I knew there was no point in searching for Mumble during the day — if she was free, she would be tucked into the thickest cover she could find, asleep.

Much as I didn’t want to, I took myself off to the magazine where I worked. But I couldn’t concentrate, and in the afternoon I left London early.

When I got home I made a really thorough search of her enclosure — for some reason I had not thought earlier to comb through the thick, knee-deep greenery on the ground.

And so it was that I found her body, face down, wings and tail outspread, almost hidden in the middle of a clump of daffodils. There was not a mark on her, and the flowers around her were completely undisturbed.

I’ll never know what happened. Was it the fear of a human intruder that stopped her fast-beating little heart for ever?

With stinging eyes and a lump in my throat, I picked her up and carried her indoors. Before that day I don’t believe I’d wept aloud for 20 years, nor have I since.

During the years I shared with Mumble, she enriched my life in a way I could never have imagined possible.

We can never know what it actually feels like to be another type of animal, let alone a bird. But Mumble and I enjoyed a companionship that was not, I know, simply based on raw, animal hunger.

She made a clear distinction between me and other humans, defending our shared territory with vigour in her pantomime villain cloak and routinely dozing on my shoulder, thus paying me the greatest compliment an animal can — that of trust.

Mumble still appears in my dreams sometimes. And, whenever she does, she unfailingly brings a surge of grateful fondness into my mind.

■ Adapted from The Owl Who Liked Sitting On Caesar by Martin Windrow, to be published by Bantam on February 27 at £12.99 © 2014 Martin Windrow. To order a copy for £11.49 (incl p&p), call 0844 472 4157. All wild birds of prey, their eggs and their hatchlings are fully protected by law. If you find what you think is a lost owlet, please enlist the help of the RSPCA, the RSPB or an expert in raptors: