The Owl That Fell from the Sky Read Online Free Page B

of the Haast River in south Westland, a remote and isolated part of the South Island of New Zealand. Suddenly, ahead of them, a bird with a rat in its talons rose up from the road and they couldn’t avoid hitting it. The pale bird was so unusual that they kept the body for a few days to show people. Nobody in the small town of Okura where they lived, not even the schoolmaster, had seen its like.
    A couple of years after the death of the pale bird, the boy, then fourteen, visited Wellington with a friend and the two of them went to the Dominion Museum to give further details to Dr Falla. Bob Falla—later Sir Robert—was the museum’s director, and New Zealand’s best-known ornithologist through his newspaper articles and radio programmes. The out-of-town visitors were no doubt a little nervous walking up the hill to the imposing museum building, where they were ushered into the staff-only precinct, but the legendary Dr Falla, tall and lanky, would soon have put them at ease with his broad smile and pleasant manner.
    In a back room where the museum’s bird reference collections were stored, Falla first showed them some study-skins of the morepork, the common New Zealand owl, which the boy knew. Then came specimens of the larger laughing owl, one of New Zealand’s many extinct birds. Finally, he produced a selection of foreign owls, and from among them the boy did not hesitate to pick out the specimen of a barn owl.
    Common barn owls— Tyto alba —are one of the world’s most widely distributed land-birds, living on all continents except Antarctica. In most parts of the world, people grow up knowing these pale ghostly owls but not in New Zealand: it is one of the few places from which they are absent. The 1955 Haast River bird was only the second ever recorded: one had been shot at Barrytown in north Westland in 1947.
    Birds fairly regularly straggle from Australia to New Zealand, carried across the Tasman Sea by the prevailing westerly winds, so it was not surprising that these owls—assumed to be Australian—fetched up on the West Coast. In 1960 a third would be found dead in a disused house at Runanga, also in north Westland.
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    An unexpected telephone call or visitor, heralding what may be a rare or unusual find, adds spice to the natural history curator’s day. Amid routine interruptions there will sooner or later, and quite at random, be an event to write home about.
    In March 1983 Graham Turbott, an ornithologist and the former director of Auckland Museum, rang me to say that a schoolgirl from Papatoetoe in south Auckland had found a strange white bird. She had been walking through the grounds of her school when she had seen the bird huddled on grass under a tree. She had thought it was dead, but then it flew off weakly. She caught it and took it home. However, despite care and attention, the unfortunate bird died in the night.
    Graham Turbott brought the corpse to the museum, and when we unwrapped the package on the workbench it was immediately clear it was some sort of barn owl. I had never seen a fresh one before, but obvious at once were the soft pale plumage, the facial feathers arranged in a characteristic large heart-shaped disc, the long legs with talons, and the small, sharp beak. A creature superbly adapted for night-time hunting, with acute hearing and silent flight, it was also beautiful, with feathers of white, grey and ochre, many of them barred or spotted.
    From the museum library upstairs we brought down bird books from around the world and studied their photographs and drawings of owls. From the museum’s reference collection of bird specimens we pulled out the handful of study-skins of tytonid, or barn, owls. Museums need natural history collections from their own country and region, but representative examples of key foreign animal groups have their uses as well.
    We took standard measurements of the dead owl, including the length of the