Any half decent guide to the countryside should include the following tip: if you find an owl by the side of the road, don’t pick it up. I was riding along the lane on the skewbald pony when I suddenly realised there were two huge eyes staring up at me. It was a beautiful brown owl that kept falling over on to its side and then righting itself as the traffic swept past.
I got off Gracie and bent down to see. He was pretty beaten up, poor thing. I put my hand out and he hopped into the ditch and fell over. This was clearly a job for the gamekeeper, the source of all natural wisdom, as well as logs and legs of venison. Plus he is always 30 seconds away.
‘What’s up, mate?’ he said, on a muffled line. He was having his lunch in a village three miles away. ‘What on earth are you doing there? You’re never three miles away. You’ve never had lunch before either.’
He told me to wait and not touch the owl until he got there in ten minutes. Unfortunately, the only girl I know who is blonder than I am then came round the corner, pulled over and wound down her window. In between crying into her phone she put her head out and said to me, ‘Oh, my god, I’m having the worst day. That guy I told you about…’
‘Never mind that. I’ve found an injured owl. Help me.’
She got out of her car, went straight into the ditch and before I could say, ‘Don’t touch the owl,’ she scooped the owl into her arms and let out a bloodcurdling scream. The owl had pushed one of its talons deep inside her hand.
Something like a battlezone mentality then came over me because I knew that the longer I left the talon in there, the less likely it was that my blonde friend would let me pull it out and this would end with her running around Surrey with an owl attached to her, possibly indefinitely.
So I grabbed her hand, shouted at her to take a deep breath, and pulled the talon as hard as I could until it was out. Whereupon the owl flapped back into the ditch, she leapt into her car screaming and screeched off into the distance (to hospital, I later discovered).
The next person to come by was the stable yard owner. I told her I had called the gamekeeper but before I could say, ‘Don’t touch the owl’…the owl embedded a talon, which she pulled out herself, saying she didn’t know what everyone was making such a fuss about. But by the time she got it back to the stable yard wrapped in a sheet it had four talons in her hand and a crowd gathered as she wept in agony. ‘Quick, ring the fire brigade,’ I said.
‘What are they going to do?’ said Geoff, a fellow horse-owner.
‘They help people who are trapped, don’t they? Well, we ring them and say our friend’s trapped on an owl. I mean, an owl’s trapped on our friend.’
Everyone shook their heads. The yard owner sobbed. The owl sat on her hand, blinking and crunching its talons tighter. Where, oh where was the gamekeeper?
Suddenly I realised that one of us was a paramedic. ‘Geoff! You’re trained for terror attacks. Chemical warfare. Nuclear Armageddon! You must know what to do?’
‘Not really,’ said Geoff, drawing heavily on a cigarette. ‘I mean, it’s an owl, isn’t it?’
The bird fidgeted and flapped. Someone ran off to find a bottle of brandy. Geoff phoned someone senior in the paramedic world. We could hear him saying, ‘Yeah, oh yeah, right, I know, OK, yeah, right, we’ll do that…’ Then he put the phone down and said, ‘You’ve got to pull it out.’
Thankfully, the gamekeeper strode into the yard at that moment. He grabbed hold of the owl and started extracting talons amid wailing. Then he put on a pair of gardening gloves and loaded the owl into a cage ready to take it to the wildlife rescue in Leatherhead.
Later, as the yard owner sipped from a mug of hot sweet tea laced with a strange liqueur someone had dug out of a cupboard, her hand submerged in a bowl of iodine, the gamekeeper began the inevitable lecture: ‘Never touch the business end of an owl, ladies,’ he said, as the owl blinked sheepishly in his cage.
‘You’re not kidding,’ said the yard owner, rallying. ‘I feel a right twit-twoo. Mind you, it’s been a hoot,’ she said, obviously delirious. ‘We’ve had a barney.’
But it wasn’t a barn owl, it was a tawny. So that joke didn’t really count, which was a shame.
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