Country notebook:m.krishnan

[Saktipada Panigrahi]

"OTHER birds fly away.Or else they go about their business,unmindful of you,or sit passively,not knowing you are there.But the Spotted Owlet resents your prying into its affairs and takes pains to let you know that it does.It glares malevolently at you from round,unwinking eyes and bobs its round head up and down,the baleful yellow eyes still upon you and a torrent of gurgling,voluble swearing pours cut at you from its squat,softly-barred form.

All the owls are apt to resent close scrutiny but none so expressively as this owlet,though it is never dangerous as some of the larger members of the tribe can be.The Spotted Owlet's intimidatory display has been called clowning, because it is so small we can afford to feel amused at it impotent anger and bowing,bobbing clock-face.Imagine the bird magnified to the size of its larger cousins and the demonstration would seem funny no longer, it would serve to scare people then all right.
......Where there are aged trees,with knots and holes in their trunks, the owlet prefers a nice dark hole in the wood, sufficiently deep for daytime retreat and siestas.Not that it has the traditional owl's intolerance of light. Spotted Owlets come out at noon sometimes to hunt prey and it has been rightly said that they are crepuscular because they fear not the sun but the mobbing to which other diurnal birds subject them when they show up in daylight.

.....Owlets clutch at their prey with their comprehensive talons and catch them that way.Insects form their staple food, hawked in the air or pounced down upon from a look out post, but they take minor lizards also,and even little birrds and mice. I do not know why such a useful bird should be so widely abhorred but the curse of owl tribe is upon it and even today there are quite a number of people encompassing its destruction when it is incautious enough to take up residence near their homes.

.......I am afraid we do not know our friends.I find the quaint, semi-cubist looks of the Spotted Owlet charming and its noiseless flight and bold behavior interest me.Other may not have my tastes (may be mine are depraved) but surely a bird so useful about the house and garden and such an efficient check on obnoxious insects deserves to be encouraged and shooting it on sight is no way to encourage any bird."
-M.Krishnan

(first published in the Sunday Statesman on 04.02.1951