Darlington’s book begins with a chance encounter on an English street. The great grey owl, native to Lapland, is just a few months old: “Her softness took my breath away. Deadly beauty.” She is tethered by jesses to her keeper, who is trying to get the bird used to people. Suddenly startled, she spreads her wings in fear, straining at the leash: “I must have closed my eyes and when I opened them again, in front of me a striped grey haze of staggering silence and softness was rising; a giant butterfly, a god of the tundra.”
With their eerie cries and nocturnal habits, owls have haunted the skies of this planet for some 60m years. Homo sapiens has been around for a mere 200,000 or so years. An unequalled stealth hunter, using hearing so acute it can be termed “earsight”, the owl has featured in our myths and stories since the beginning. But Darlington is interested in the real predator and she travels across Europe tracking down nearly all the continent’s 13 native species. They range from the diminutive pygmy owl that “would fit inside a coffee cup” and is found at the edge of the Alps in southern France, to the Eurasian eagle owl, the world’s largest, armed with “jugular-crushing talons” and a “flesh-ripping bill”. In parts of Liverpool some drug dealers keep eagle owls instead of aggressive dogs: it is the “avian equivalent of a pit bull terrier”. But even these fearsome birds are now endangered, their numbers down by 60% in Finland, where she travels to see them; this sad story is echoed across all the species Darlington encounters.
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