Owls, frontally eyed and nose beaked, look the most human of birds. Accordingly, they have for millennia been prominent in mythology and literature and their image continues to be commercialised beyond compare. They offer an author rich pickings, but in a competitive market a strong personal subtext is helpful. That improbable bestseller H is for Hawk told of a bird consoling and inspiring a daughter grieving for her father.Owl Sense has a mother finding a healing source in owls for herself and her worryingly ill son Benji. His Non-Epileptic Seizure Disorder (NEAD) took a disconcerting time to diagnose and is frighteningly unpredictable. Just how frightening is illustrated by his collapse on a bus as a 6ft, 16st student. For the remainder of the journey he lay motionless, stepped over and unreported by the passengers, with no alarm raised until arrival at the depot.
Dr Darlington, who gained a PhD researching her last book, Otter Country, spent four years on that quest. When she embarked on owls, Benji’s serious illness intervened. She was reminded of the famous opening line of Dante’s Inferno: ‘Midway along life’s journey, I found myself in a dark wood, and the path was lost.’ She had a choice: shelve the project or work it around Benji, with the help of her rarely mentioned but clearly vitally supportive husband and daughter. Fortuitously, Benji liked owls. They proved therapeutic for son and mother. Indeed Benji’s alarming illness made them all owl-like. It brought them into communion with the wildness of the birds: ‘The family gained a new attentiveness, a kind of listening sensitivity.’
The world has 216 owl species. Darlington originally confined herself to our five native birds: tawny, the most urban and numerous; barn, now dependent on bird boxes for a third of its nests; the diurnal little owl, emblem of the goddess Athena, introduced in the 19th-century but today officially in ‘rapid decline’; and the two scarce, in part migratory, wilderness species, the long-eared and short-eared.
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