The Owls Have It
In which my toddler’s obsession with owls makes me realise that she is, like, a real person
It started with Olive, obviously. All the best things do.
‘The Velvet Owl’, we called her, because of that silky soft head, those ridiculously satiny floppy black ears that sat in little owly tufts, her enormous round hazelnut eyes, that peaceful wisdom. And when the baby came she was just the same, all downy dark hair, huge grey-brown eyes like marbles, totally serene and utterly knowing, the two of them curled up in my lap, my funny, fuzzy baby birds. ‘Now we have two.’
Before she was The Second Velvet Owl, however, before she was born, even, she was The Pingu, an in utero nickname stemming from a long-running penguin joke Mike and I had together, which meant that whenever we spotted a penguin toy, a penguin artwork, a penguin children’s book or a pair of penguin baby socks we considered it a good luck sign and bought it for the bump. By the time she was one minute old she was already the proud owner of six books about penguins, three penguin onesies and four stuffed penguin toys, including Bingu, the scrappy little Jellycat penguin we bought in the hospital gift shop on the way up to the labour ward two days earlier, and whose full formal given title is Bingu The Birthday Pingu, because he was her very first ever present on her very first ever birthday.
Once we’d mentioned to family and friends that she too was The Velvet Owl, the owl literature started arriving, joining all the existing penguin literature on her bookshelf. First came Julia Donaldson’s lift-the-flap book There’s An Owl In My Towel and Martin Waddell’s Owl Babies, about Sarah, Percy and Bill, three little owls waiting for their owl mother to come home. Then WOW! Said The Owl, Tim Hopgood’s magnificent book of colours, and A Bit Lost by Chris Houghton, in which a baby owl accidentally topples off his perch while sleeping.
By the time we realised that owls really are absolutely bloody everywhere in children’s culture, so had she.
‘Owl! Owl! Owl!’ she began shrieking every time we opened The Gruffalo. ‘Owl! Owl! Owl!’ pointing out every owl on every page of The Animal Orchestra musical books. (At an average of 2.5 owls per page across five books, that’s a whole lotta owl.) ‘Owl! Owl! Owl!’ at a picture of Little Red Riding Hood who does, in fairness, look rather owly when the hood’s up. ‘Owl! Owl! Owl!’ when she discovered one of her bath toys was, in fact, an owl. ‘Owl! Owl! Owl!’ when she spotted an owly face in one of the animal letters on her bedroom door. ‘Owl! Owl! Owl!’ slamming shut Goodnight Moon and flipping it over to jab at a minuscule owl line drawing of the Two Hoots publishing symbol on the back cover. This 15-month-old baby was spotting owls where I didn’t know owls existed.
‘Maybe it’s because she looks like an owl with those great big saucer eyes,’ my sister said. ‘Maybe she thinks she is one.’ Maybe it’s just a fun word to say. Perhaps she loves being so utterly certain about what this one thing is, and how she can recognise all of them, however different they look: snowy, barn, tawny, cartoon, surrealist. Perhaps we’d already laid good owl groundwork by filling our home with all those (now redundant, sorry Bingu) penguins; smaller eyes, sure, but very owl-adjacent, as winged creatures go.
One afternoon, while the little owl fanatic was at nursery, I spotted a set of three painted wooden owls at a craft stall, the largest about the size of her head, and picked them up to surprise her with, arranging them all on different shelves in her bedroom. Reading Owl Babies later that evening (and every evening) she spotted one, then the other, finally the last one, and after a lengthy chorus of owl-based excitement insisted on sleeping clutching the two largest owls to her chest. At least two wooden owls have slept cuddled up with her every single night since. (I tried to swap out her rock hard wooden owl pals for something softer and cosier by buying her a big fluffy owl toy; now she sleeps with one big fluffy owl toy and a pair of rock hard wooden owls every single night. It’s quite the parliament going on in that cot.)
So now the first thing she says when she wakes up every morning - thrusting one fluffy and one wooden owl into my face - and the last thing she says before she goes to bed every night - insisting I fetch her painted pals off a shelf for her to cuddle - is owl. It is fair to say, I think, that the kid has found her very first passion.
Of course, babies like stuff (rattles, dogs, balls, blowing raspberries), maybe they even love some stuff (tickles, blueberries, bubbles, boobs), but this owl obsession feels different: suddenly there’s this thing she’s into that not all her little friends are. Suddenly she has her own interests. Suddenly she feels so much more like her own individual little person who will one day choose her own clothes, her own friends, her own A-level subjects, her own inappropriate romantic partners. My tiny little sleepy squishy baby, all grown up and bubbling with free will and personality and individualism and owl-shaped dreams of her own!
And suddenly it is all so abundantly clear. Our job as her parents is to nurture these passions! So nurture them we do. By taking her to a local owl sanctuary. And that's where shit gets weird.
We locate one about an hour away, and although they don’t have much of an internet presence the reviews look largely excellent so I think ‘what the hey’, and we bundle the toddler and Mike’s 12-year-old son into the car and head off.
Our first warning should be when I call en route to check they are open and a woman barks down the phone ‘got three dogs, what time will you come, I’m making korma’. Whether this is an unrelated statement to someone else in the room or an invite to lunch is unclear.
We arrive at a slightly disheveled terraced house with a wonky owl sanctuary sign outside, ring the bell, and a tiny, cheerful, slightly unhinged woman with several missing teeth lets us in, inviting us to walk through her dark, damp, hoarder’s paradise, through a kitchen where something is bubbling on the stove that doesn’t look much like korma, out into a long thin crumbling garden flanked with huge cages and paved entirely with decades of faeces from three dogs who are running inside and outside at breakneck speed.
Owl Lady leads us inside a large cage full of enormous brown owls and starts reeling off owl facts, though when I ask ‘what type of owls are these?’ she seems confused by the question. ‘They’re owls. Big owls. Just don’t bend over. They don’t like it. And if they grab you with their hands they won’t ever let go.’
I exit the cage as fast as I can while carrying an excited toddler, trying not to step in the cacophony of excrement painted all over the back yard or be mauled to smithereens by a fucking massive owl. Toddler, meanwhile, is totally agog, eyes wide, pointing at all the owls and shouting the word over and over; I think until now she has assumed owls are mythical creatures.
We stay as long as is polite (4.2 minutes precisely) then stuff a £20 donation in her hands and make our swift escape, wondering if maybe there are healthy limits to nurturing your child’s passions.
Happily, although the rest of us all have owl-based PTSD from the visit, the baby was not in any way put off and owls are still flavour of the month three weeks later. I’m sure one day owls will be out and unicorns will be in, but for now, while I can hear her upstairs chatting about owls with her dada during bathtime, this wholesome owl phase is the most magical first love I could possibly have imagined for her, and I never want to forget it.
At nursery pick-up yesterday I told one of the girls that my kid was ‘quite into owls’ (*mild understatement*), and this afternoon my phone pinged with a notification from their childcare app. When I opened it I found three photos of The Velvet Owl sitting in what can only be described as an indoor woodland glen, a little astroturf circle covered in pine cones and twigs, surrounded by tree stump cushions, little wooden birds scattered on fake tree trunks. In one of the photos she is clutching two owls and looking like she is at an actual theme park.
‘This morning my teachers set up the most amazing owl activity as my mummy shared I love owls at the moment,’ the caption read. 'I was very excited to play with and look at baby owls, and displayed the most wonderful facial expressions!’
Nah, I don’t think there are limits. Nurture away.
What a gorgeous post. She seems like an amazing little girl and so lucky to have such invested parents and childcare. X
Just wonderful🦉🦉🦉