Diva Harris reflects on a summer of big, ancient oaks and Little Owls.

Ground cover: High grass full of lost possessions. Bracket fungus, pulped oak bough, fur and coughed-up bones.

It began with a serendipitous encounter beneath the boughs of the park’s tallest, oldest tree several months ago, when there was still a chill in the air at dusk.

Like most anything which has lived in the world since the Middle Ages, the ancient oak has seen, and it knows. People gravitate towards the tree. Sometimes it’s women who would self-describe as “earth mothers” resting a gentle hand on the trunk, briefly closing their eyes and turning their face up to the leaves. Othertimes, teenagers barely conscious of their surroundings sit in its shade, swapping gossip and liquid nicotine. Sometimes people in need of somewhere to sleep will erect a tent here. People have left candles and laminated tributes to dead fathers in the hole in the bole. People have left bottlecaps and the ends of spliffs. Some people are deeply, consciously connected to the tree, and other people just seem to end up in its vicinity. Some people give the tree gifts on purpose, and others leave offerings by accident. I often find myself standing under it, looking at the sky, thinking about something or nothing at all, my worries and missteps an insignificant blink in the tree’s knotted eye. The dog enjoys nosing through the long grass around the roots, where we have lost several frisbees and balls, and found several others. 

I am standing under the tree when a fellow dog walker greets me one evening and asks: “Are you looking for the owls?”

Though I am conscious of the non-human lives that unfurl alongside our picnics, ice creams, skinned knees and snowball fights — herons, newts, stag beetles, bats — I have never crossed paths with a south London owl. This tree is populated with Little Owls (Athene noctua) the stranger explains, and you can spot them if you time it just right. This is all the information I get before our dogs have a disagreement, and we walk in opposite directions.

My chest immediately aches with desire for the owls. I cannot stop thinking about them, and I make it my mission to track them down.

The days turn into weeks. I don’t really know what to do, what signs I am looking for, so the dog and I walk to the tree every evening at sundown, and gaze up into the canopy for signs of movement.

The weeks become months, and there is neither hoot nor beak. Still we make a nightly pilgrimage with the devotion of believers, wearing desire lines into the soil, developing our own ritual of two. The usually sprightly and talkative dog seems to understand that this activity requires stillness and silence.

The owls are, as their name suggests, very small. The oak is very big — perhaps 500ft tall. The wheel of the year continues to turn and the canopy thickens with more and more foliage — the perfect privacy screen. The domain between our worlds of day and night is brief; opportunity to catch each other slim. Not that they’re trying to catch me; only one of us has hopes pinned on the other.

One night, continuously failed by my eyes, I decide to look instead with my ears, searching for anything unfamiliar between the sounds of traffic, sirens, parakeets and lary park drinkers. I stumble upon something wholly unlike a tawny’s stereotypical twit twoo owl noise, and much more like the yips of the backflipping, battery-operated dogs that were popular in my 90s childhood. I use the birdsong identification app to confirm my suspicions: it is the toylike call of the stuffed-toy owl.

Once I’ve got my ear in, know they’re there for sure, the fate of our meeting seems sealed. The first time is not under the ancient oak, but instead a spindly sapling quite some distance away, when I have accidentally stayed out later than usual. It is the beginnings of a lesson about expectation and reality; about finding things in the last place you’d think to look. I do not immediately realise what, or rather who, I am looking at, my eyes ill-adjusted to the dark, until the pint-sized bird begins to bob and weave its head, assessing my size, distance, and if I am a threat. It is at head-height, touching distance, and our moony pupils meet for a few delicious seconds, before I realise what is happening and startle the bird with a sharp intake of breath. It’s enough though; I’m already weeping with delight. I run home and babble incoherently to B, finding only strange and rambly size comparisons — imagine an owl the size of a Toby jug! A large Russian doll! Two-thirds of a pint of bitter in a tree!

Having built an understanding of their sounds, approximate size and profile, I can all of a sudden determine the owls’ whereabouts intuitively. For a period of weeks, I visit the oak between 9.00 and 9.30pm every evening, and the owls are there waiting for me at our regular table, as if we have a standing dinner reservation.

I learn their favourite perches well enough to tell trusted park friends where to spot them. I take no encounter for granted; every single one is moving and meaningful in a way I can’t quite put into words. I experience a summer’s worth of joy and gratitude and wonder, in quiet company under the oak tree. Sometimes I see two, three owls at once, shuffling, bobbing, squeaking, flapping. Though the internet alleges that they are most active in the day, I only ever see them as we tip into the night.

I fret for the owls through our second, third, fourth official heatwaves. I fret for them when I get to the park and see a huge limb snapped from the ancient tree like a broken bone — some of it scented like an incensed church, some like bad, sticky rot; all of it wrong, these smells from the sky suddenly on the ground.

The owls factor into my doomy brain’s perpetual omen-balancing act — a form of mad personal divination. I am my own obsessive-compulsive oracle. Rotten tree limbs, broken jewellery, the deer that jumps out in front of my dad’s car on the motorway: bad. Tube mouse, three-legged-dog, tiny owl: good. It is in my nature to assign meaning to neutral things; it is in the owls’ not to.

I become uncharacteristically receptive to owl tat* because it reminds me of the precious minutes spent with the owls in the park. I buy B an age-spotted, owl-themed, sentimentally-sloganed birthday card on a market stall. We magnet a postcard of a salt-glazed pottery owl to the fridge.

Then something changes again; I’m not sure what. Perhaps the owls have entered a new phase of activity, requiring a change in schedule, and we’re back out of step. I choose to believe that they haven’t come to harm, but all is quiet in the tree again, its tiny residents once again hidden from view.

I recently read a statistic about the sheer amount of life a single oak tree can harbour — not just owls but many thousands of species bird, mammal, insect and fungus. This particular tree — sprung from a cracked acorn 600 years ago, when this entire London Borough was nothing but fields — surely harbours all our human lives too; 600 years of us meeting here, sheltering from rain or sun with our dogs or livestock, losing things out of our pockets (and before that, losing things out of our pouches. This tree has been harbouring life since before the invention of the modern pocket.) 600 years of looking up at the birds — albeit not these specific birds, introduced from Europe by wealthy landowners only in the 19th century. But the tree doesn’t differentiate, it just continues to host. Continues to connect, ground and harbour us, bird, beast and person.

Perhaps I am more like the earth mothers than I care to think.

^{*Please do not buy me owl tat.}