My friends, the owls

In the company of owls, Polly Atkin finds solace from debilitating illness

- POLLY ATKIN

IT IS MID-MAY AND I AM SITTING on a fallen tree in a wood, alone, squinting into the fast-fading light.

Midges are nipping at my face and hairline. I want to pull up my hood to stop them biting my scalp but I don't want to cover my ears. Under the cover of the beeches and oaks it is almost entirely dark now, a kind of false, early tree-night.

I am waiting for owlets. Tawny owlets.

I am sure that if I wait just a few minutes longer, I will hear their strange, raspy call - skeee skeee skeee - to tell me where they are. I know they are here, somewhere in the trees, because my partner and I have been watching them on and off for two weeks now, after a chance encounter one afternoon.

It seems foolish to be sitting out here letting midges feast on me, in the hope of making myself a mild annoyance to some other living creatures in turn, and I'm getting tired. Soon, I won't be able to see my footing on the way home.

Earlier, ambling up the road by twilight, I had passed a couple drinking wine outside their holiday home and overheard them exclaim how strange it was for anyone to be walking at this hour. Not here, I thought, where it is entirely normal for people to walk at all times of day and night, seeking stars or dawn cloud inversions, northern lights or northern sunsets. But this evening I am the only human in this wood.

I have been fascinated with owls since childhood. Growing up in suburban Nottingham, we occasionally had a tawny owl roosting in the tall trees around our 1950s house that were the remnants of much earlier, grander gardens. When I first moved to Grasmere in the Lake District, I lived in an attic room and was delighted to find I could hear tawny owls calling at night when I lay there, tucked into the eaves.