Feb 6, 2019 07:13 PM
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/nat...llen-skies
EXCERPT: . . . The email is from my neighbour, Richard. “Sad news,” it begins. “I picked up a dead barn owl on the road… I am assuming it had been hit by a car, although there was no obvious external injury. If you want to take a look at the beautiful creature, I have it here. We can ill afford to lose them!”
I find my torch and a woolly hat and knock on Richard and Sue’s back door. The white owl lies on newspaper in the passageway, black-eyed, breathtakingly beautiful, utterly unmarked; but as I pick it up its head lolls loosely and road grit falls from its feathers, pattering down. I gently stretch out one archangel wing and its tendons tighten to retract it. For an awful moment I believe it is still alive, and suffering.
[...] Barn owls die in great numbers at this time of year, many from starvation: in winter mice and voles are less active above ground, and therefore harder to catch. Inexperienced juveniles are at greatest risk, both of starvation and from traffic: 3,000 to 5,000 barn owls die annually on Britain’s roads from a population of only around 4,000 adult pairs (who produce around 12,000 young per year). This one – a male, I think – feels well fed, but does look young. One leg bears a metal ring, and Richard has already sent in a report to the British Trust for Ornithology. A few days later we’ll hear that he was from a brood hatched at a nearby farm last spring; he was only eight months old.
[...] In winter mortality peaks for humans, as well as barn owls and other creatures, which is no surprise. As we sleep, small mammals freeze to death and the bodies of birds drop quietly from their roosts, felled by cold. We witness little of this, as most animal corpses are either scavenged or quickly decay, often taken underground by burying beetles where decomposition returns their carbon, water and other nutrients to the soil: faster when the ground is warm, more slowly in the winter months. This process of recycling is vital to life on Earth; one of the most chilling things about the Chernobyl disaster was the way that decay was halted, radiation having wiped out the leaf litter’s invertebrate, microbial and fungal communities. Whatever died in those forests – shed leaves, insects, birds, mammals – didn’t even rot. It simply remained.
In some scenic parts of the British countryside you’re now more likely to stumble across lingering evidence of human deaths than animal. I’ve lost count of the number of shrines, floral tributes (many with plastic wrapping or artificial ribbons), metal plaques, benches and even piles of ashes I’ve passed; the summit of Snowdon is apparently now so covered in incinerated people that its sensitive ecology is being changed. I understand the impulse – it’s what we did with Mum, at her request – but there is something odd about hiking a beautiful stretch of coastal path, for example, and passing death after death after death....
MORE (details): https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/nat...llen-skies
EXCERPT: . . . The email is from my neighbour, Richard. “Sad news,” it begins. “I picked up a dead barn owl on the road… I am assuming it had been hit by a car, although there was no obvious external injury. If you want to take a look at the beautiful creature, I have it here. We can ill afford to lose them!”
I find my torch and a woolly hat and knock on Richard and Sue’s back door. The white owl lies on newspaper in the passageway, black-eyed, breathtakingly beautiful, utterly unmarked; but as I pick it up its head lolls loosely and road grit falls from its feathers, pattering down. I gently stretch out one archangel wing and its tendons tighten to retract it. For an awful moment I believe it is still alive, and suffering.
[...] Barn owls die in great numbers at this time of year, many from starvation: in winter mice and voles are less active above ground, and therefore harder to catch. Inexperienced juveniles are at greatest risk, both of starvation and from traffic: 3,000 to 5,000 barn owls die annually on Britain’s roads from a population of only around 4,000 adult pairs (who produce around 12,000 young per year). This one – a male, I think – feels well fed, but does look young. One leg bears a metal ring, and Richard has already sent in a report to the British Trust for Ornithology. A few days later we’ll hear that he was from a brood hatched at a nearby farm last spring; he was only eight months old.
[...] In winter mortality peaks for humans, as well as barn owls and other creatures, which is no surprise. As we sleep, small mammals freeze to death and the bodies of birds drop quietly from their roosts, felled by cold. We witness little of this, as most animal corpses are either scavenged or quickly decay, often taken underground by burying beetles where decomposition returns their carbon, water and other nutrients to the soil: faster when the ground is warm, more slowly in the winter months. This process of recycling is vital to life on Earth; one of the most chilling things about the Chernobyl disaster was the way that decay was halted, radiation having wiped out the leaf litter’s invertebrate, microbial and fungal communities. Whatever died in those forests – shed leaves, insects, birds, mammals – didn’t even rot. It simply remained.
In some scenic parts of the British countryside you’re now more likely to stumble across lingering evidence of human deaths than animal. I’ve lost count of the number of shrines, floral tributes (many with plastic wrapping or artificial ribbons), metal plaques, benches and even piles of ashes I’ve passed; the summit of Snowdon is apparently now so covered in incinerated people that its sensitive ecology is being changed. I understand the impulse – it’s what we did with Mum, at her request – but there is something odd about hiking a beautiful stretch of coastal path, for example, and passing death after death after death....
MORE (details): https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/nat...llen-skies