The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar Read Online Free

Wellington’s fierce yellow eyes blazing defiance from the shadows behind the wire mesh. After eating supper myself I would get some food out of the fridge for him, and settle down for the first sessions of trying to ‘man’ him. In the wild Wellington’s diet would have consisted largely of insects, though he would have relished anything from craneflies, earwigs, beetles, moths, worms, slugs and snails up to small rodents. Having been raised in captivity, however, he was accustomed to the usual rations for captive birds of prey: dead day-old chicks, which are handy little packages of nutrition still with egg yolk in their body cavities. Chicken hatcheries always have large supplies of these unwanted male chicks, and have learned that they can make a few pounds by refrigerating sacks of them for sale to falconers. Dick had given me a couple of dozen to keep Wellington going until I found a regular supplier of my own through the Yellow Pages.
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    There is seldom any secret to taming a wild animal, beyond common sense and kindness. You have to handle them gently and repeatedly until they lose their fear of you. You have to be endlessly calm and patient, because if you project fear or anger you can set the process back by days. This is, of course, especially true of a solitary animal as opposed to a pack animal: while a puppy has the mental mechanism to understand the concept of ‘correction’, andwill make a submissive response, a hunting bird interprets any sudden move as simple aggression.
    You have to use their hunger to entice them to tolerate you; hunger is at first your only way of creating any kind of transaction between you. ‘Hunger’ means appetite – not starvation. Apart from being cruel, starvation is obviously counter-productive: you are trying to create a mood of calmness, and what starving creature is calm? Birds of prey consume a lot of ‘fuel’, so need regular feeding, and by learning to regulate the amount and timing of the daily meal it is usually possible to establish some kind of routine fairly quickly. (I should emphasize here that I am talking about taming a bird as a pet, not the much more complex process of training it to hunt free. True falconry involves very careful feeding and regular weighing, calculating the bird’s rations to keep it healthy but ‘sharp set’, so that it will be strong but still keen to hunt.)
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    All I was hoping to achieve with Wellington was a basic level of tameness. I wanted him to learn to come to me of his own free will, at first for food and later, perhaps, simply to a call or whistle. I wanted him to lose his street-fighter wariness, and allow himself to be played with and enjoyed. It seemed a reasonable target to set myself. After all, I had watched Dick make it seem ridiculously easy; he had once trained a kestrel indoors to come to his fist for food in less than a week, so I thought I knew roughly how to go about this game.
    First spreading a newspaper on the floor by my chair and an old towel over the arm, to guard against accidents of a scatological nature, I would slip my left hand into an old driving glove (you don’t really need a glove for protection with a little bird like Wellington, but it gives them a better grip when they are standing on your fist). Then, with a bootlace leash between my teeth, I would ease the cage door open a few inches and grope hopefully inside, trying to get hold of Wellington’s dangling jesses and swivel, while he pranced and hissed his way around the most awkward corners of the cage. Finally getting a grip, I would gently pull him out until he abandoned resistance and jumped up on to my left fist. With my other hand I slipped the leash through the swivel ring and wound its hanging end loosely round my fingers, holding the swivel firmly between thumb and forefinger until I was settled in my chair and could give him a bit more rope.
    The purpose of the exercise was to accustom him to my company to the point