Feet that could break a mouse’s back had come to rest at the side of the road. Claws that had begun that night locked around a branch at the heart of a tree were clenched together, making half-fists in the air. The wings that had borne the body too low, or too slow, hung limply by its side. And the white feather on its shoulder, braided with age and wear into a ragged-toothed comb, would never have to moult.
The impact had smacked this poor tawny owl beyond the pavement, over the crash barrier, to land among the grass on a squashed tin can. We knelt beside the bird, as mourners and ghouls, to pity and inspect.
It was a familiar routine. Only a fortnight earlier, a Chinese water deer had been brought down a hundred metres north, head back, feet splayed as if to leap. A wretched sight, but also a first – though it was only a five-minute walk from my house, I had never seen any, alive or dead, before within 10 miles of home. A day later the deer was gone, the site of its death memorialised in the click of a mouse and a dot on a mammal recorder’s map. And badgers, so many that I no longer bothered to tell anybody. A dozen or more dead in one 30-mile journey from this spot.
Hanging over the prone body of the tawny owl, a breeze lifted to jiggle the grass heads disrespectfully. A greater wind, a gust from a lorry, whipped up a scatter of feathers, the tiny curls of down that had been shaken free that night. “Tawny” could not do justice to the overlapping bands of gold, white, buff and chestnut.
I caught a whiff of summer bins – this bird had lain there longer than I’d thought. Insects walked all over, ants pattering over the vanes on the owl’s back and flanks, slowing to make pointless foraging ascents and descents of the ruffed-up mass at the back of its head.
Flies were this dead bird’s vultures. They swirled around with one intent and when a glossy greenbottle landed I felt its padded feet feeling for opportunity, seeking to lay new life into the dead.
