Owl Insists It Is Not Grumpy, It Simply Cannot Move Its Eyes

A tawny owl living in the old oak beside the village playing field has issued a statement asking residents to stop describing her as grumpy, disapproving or, in the words of one dog walker, deeply unimpressed. The statement was delivered at dusk from her usual branch, to a small audience of two pigeons, a jogger who had stopped to tie a shoelace, and a hedgehog who happened to be passing.

The owl said she had been aware of the rumours for some time. People waved at her, and she stared at them. People said good evening, and she stared at them. A child once showed her a drawing of an owl, quite a good one, and she stared at that too. She understood how it looked. She wished to make clear that none of it was personal.

The problem, she explained, is her eyes, which do not move. Other animals can glance sideways, roll their eyes at a bad joke or look politely at the floor. She cannot. Her eyes point straight ahead, all the time, so everything she looks at is looked at directly and with full attention, whether it deserves it or not. The drawing, she added, did deserve it.

To see anything to one side, she has to turn her whole head, which she does slowly and very smoothly, and which a family on a picnic last summer described as the most surprising thing they had ever seen at a picnic. She said she had only wanted to check where a paper napkin had blown. She has asked that turning round be accepted as a form of good manners.

Asked whether she was, in fact, ever grumpy, the owl said that she was occasionally grumpy at about eleven in the morning, when the playing field is at its loudest and she is trying to sleep, but that this is a normal feeling anyone would have. She then closed her eyes slowly, which the pigeons took as a sign that the statement was over. It was.

Behind the joke is a real piece of owl design. An owl's eyes are not round balls like ours but long and tube-shaped, and they are held firmly in place by a ring of bone, so they cannot swivel in their sockets. That shape helps give owls excellent vision in dim light, but it means an owl has to point its whole face at whatever it wants to look at, which is exactly why owls seem to stare so hard.

To make up for it, owls have remarkably flexible necks and can turn their heads around roughly three quarters of a full circle. Their flat, round faces also help gather sound towards their ears, which is why an owl often turns to face a noise before it has seen anything at all. So the long, steady stare is not a judgement. It is simply an owl paying attention in the only way it can.