Let me tell you about my neighbours, the owls.

Let me tell you about what I have learnt of them, the ways of them, over the years I have lived alongside them. Their lives of night-hunt and day-rest, their lives amongst trees and their lives amongst houses. Let me tell you what I have learnt about everything else through them. About difference and aloneness and companionship and difficulty. About sensitivity and materiality. About watchfulness and vocalness. About survival and joy. About the choices we make to protect those we care for and the choices we make to protect ourselves. About knowing which to focus on at any one time. When to tolerate disruption, when to leave. Let me tell you what I know and let me tell you about everything I don’t know. That this too is a kind of knowledge you might find in a twilit wood, or in the small hours, as you sit alert, listening for proof that you are not the only living thing left after all.

For a long time, I knew I lived amongst owls, but I did not see them. This is how it is for so many of us.

My first year in Grasmere I lived in the attic room of a Victorian cottage shared with two other humans, my bed tucked under the eaves. I would hear owls at night, so close they sounded as though they were sitting on the outer sill of my one small window. I recognised them from their voices as tawny owls, the owls of the woods, the owls of picture books, who give us the sound we are taught as children that all owls make – tu-whit tu-who. The sound notated by Shakespeare and Thomas Vautor, and by William Wordsworth, whose writing had brought me to this place. The owls of my own childhood home – the only kind I had ever seen in the wild. So I knew enough to know who they were as they sat above and around my attic bedroom, one calling ke-wick! ke-wick! into the starlight, another answering hoo-hooooo.

I imagined I could feel them peering in at me, could hear their beaks tapping against the glass, but if I drew aside my makeshift curtain, there was never any sign of them. Still, I knew they were there, maybe perched on the lintel just over my head. In the winter as I lay awake shivering, watching my breath cast icy planets into the cold room, it comforted me to think of their warm bodies beyond the frost-scrawled glass. There was life out there, life going on. I realised they must live in the trees of the gardens or the woods above Town End and come down at night to hunt around the little hamlet whilst we humans were all tucked away and out of sight. I knew the slate walls of the cottages and their yards were wriggling with bank voles and weasels and wood mice and slow worms: a veritable feast for my neighbours, the owls.

One warm night in my first summer here a barn owl swooped over the beer garden of the pub as I sat out with friends – a pale spectre blotting out the stars for just a moment as I happened to look up. No one saw it but me. It might as well have been a ghost.

I caught no sight of the tawny owls, though I kept on hearing them. I heard them calling from the woods at night and on winter afternoons, and I heard them from every room I slept in. Ten years passed in which I never saw them, in which they were voices in the dark that may as well have had no bodies. I moved out of my attic and down to Lancaster, then home to Nottingham for ten months, during which time my parents moved from the house I grew up in, with its owl-friendly garden, to a smaller house with a neat and manageable yard. I moved back to Grasmere with my partner, renting a freezing flat then a flooding cottage at the north end of the village, next to a wood from which owls would call at night. Still, we never saw them; only late one night on the drive back from Manchester a tawny owl flew from the shore of Rydal Water over the car as we wound along the lake road. I thought it was going to hit the windscreen, but it skimmed over us and away. We had been in Manchester to hear Neko Case play. She had sung her song with the line “my love, I’m an owl on your sill in the evening” and we’d sung along, inside and outside the glass of the window ourselves. We knew the owls were around us, all the time. We suspected they simply did not wish for us to see them. We respected their position. Who wants to be overseen as you go about your daily, nightly, business? We knew they were there, like a new moon. We did not need visual proof.

Eventually we found ourselves back where I began my life in Grasmere: renting a 17th-century farm labourer’s cottage right next to the house where I’d once haunted the attic. And once again living with the owls’ nightly visitations. Owls on the roof and the windowsill all winter. Owls singing me to sleep. Owls keeping me company when sleep will not come or the noise of my body will not let me sink into it. Eventually, owls visible to the human eye.

I’m going to tell you about my neighbours, the owls, but what I can tell you about them is only what a neighbour knows. I am not a naturalist or an ornithologist. I am no expert in things owls or owlish. I just live next to some. Everything I know about my neighbours, the owls, I know through the imperfect lens of my own watching, my own earthbound body, my own heavy head and all it has hoarded over my lifetime. It is knowledge gleaned in fragments, learnt through coincidence and chronic illness. I cannot wait unmoving in the cold or the dark for hours in the hope of a sighting, or carry myself to places on foot far from home or the road or safe paths to seek them out. This book is about owls, but it is also about me. My knowledge is casual, accidental, filtered through pop culture and literature and entirely tempered by partiality. Because I love my neighbours, the owls. I love them and I want you to love them too.

This article is extracted from The Company of Owls by Polly Atkin, published by Elliott & Thompson in hardback at £16.99 on 7 November 2024. Grasmere lies in the heart of the Lake District.

Polly Atkin is a poet and non-fiction writer who lives in the English Lake District. Her memoir exploring place, belonging and disability, Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre, 2023), won the Hunter Davies Lakeland Book of the Year 2024 and was longlisted for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing.

Did you know?

• Adult tawny owls and owlets enjoy sunbathing, not just in a tree but spreading themselves out in the sun on the ground, raising their wings to get sun under them.

• Female tawny owls are larger than males, with a wider wingspan and they are generally stronger hunters, doing the majority of hunting and feeding of the young.

• The tawny owls have a range of vocalisations for different scenarios.

• Owlets branch because they are seeking light; it’s more important to them than staying protected in the dark.

• Owlets hatch several days apart from each other, as tawny owls lay their eggs one by one and incubate each as soon as it’s laid.

• Tawny owls have the smallest territory of any of our owls, 30–50 hectares at most.

• Tawny owls tend not to travel far, many only moving a few miles in their entire life.

• Tawny owls form life-long partnerships, but they do not live together all the year. From late summer to mid-autumn they roost separately, coming together again as the nights draw in and the temperature falls.

• Tawny owls are renowned for being territorial and are particularly protective of their young.