The fields are silent now, but occasionally the melancholy “kee-oo” cry of a little owl rings out over them. It is like the mewing “mee-oo” call of a buzzard. When a few years ago buzzards began to appear in eastern England, I remember hearing a cry and thinking, “ah, a little owl”. I was astonished to look up and find a buzzard — the first I had ever seen in Hertfordshire.
Little owls were introduced here from the Continent in the late 19th century and acclimatised quickly — so much so that hardly anyone thinks of them now as an alien species. They are birds of farmland, and nest mostly in holes in trees. They are out and about in daytime as well as at night, and one often sees them sitting on five-bar gates between hedges.
I once had very good views of one sitting on a nameplate that was stuck in the earth outside the gates of a country house. It was studying the ground looking for beetles, and, though as I approached it started bobbing nervously, it let me get very close. They frequently walk about looking for insects. If they stare straight at you, you find that they have a small, flat face with inward-curving white eyebrows, which makes them look as if they were puzzled or frowning at the sight of you.
The First World War poet Julian Grenfell wrote about a soldier waiting for the fighting to begin, in his poem Into Battle: “The kestrel hovering by day/And the little owls that call by night/Bid him be swift and keen as they . . .” The poem was much quoted at this time last year, and I kept wondering if Grenfell was just speaking generally of owls, or specifically about this ominous little bird, which he had heard and recognised, as night fell on tomorrow’s battlefield.