A variety of news outlets, including the BBC and the Westmorland Gazette, have published a beautiful, haunting picture of an imprint made by an owl – probably a tawny owl – when it crashed into the window of Sally Arnold’s home in Kendal.
There was no sign of the actual bird or of any remains – just the Turin Shroud-esque marks of the body, face and wings on the window-glass – so it appears to have survived. “We can only assume that it had flown away probably suffering from a headache,” Arnold said.
The incident sparked memories for Caledonian Mercury reader Paul Hesp, a Dutchman based in Vienna who experienced a similar incident a couple of years ago. Hesp’s owl – pictured above – hit his apartment window on 22 or 23 September 2009, and – as with the Kendal impact – the ghostly residue wasn’t caused by dust on the window.
“The window was not particularly dirty,” Hesp said at the time. “The bird left the mark. Could it be dust or grease on the wings?” Again there was no body beneath the window (perhaps the owl could be said to have gone awol), so it appears to have been another bird-with-a-sore-head job.
Despite Hesp being happy to let the beautiful outline stay on the window long-term – and aware that the window faced north-east, a dry direction – it did eventually fade. “The image rained off eventually,” he said when asked about it again today, “but it was there for quite a bit of time.”
He knows of no other incidents, but confirmation that these things do happen from time to time can be found in the sequence of readers’ photographs published by the BBC. These mainly show owl imprints, but with a couple of pigeons, a collared dove, a sparrowhawk and a duck in there as well.
One curious aspect to this is the nature of the “powder down” mentioned in the other reports – described as “a substance protecting growing feathers” and the cause of the residue on the glass in each instance. The Caledonian Mercury contacted the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and asked Val Osborne – the senior wildlife enquires advisor quoted in the BBC report – if she could provide any more information.
“The little I can find about ‘powder down’,” Osborne said, “suggests that most birds may have it but perhaps in varying amounts. It’s actually produced by the feathers and the powder surrounds the future barbules in the growing feather. Barbules are just branches of feathers which are rather complicated structures.”
More generally, there is the question of why it seems to be mainly owls which cause these eerie images. “I’ve no idea whether all species of owls have this,” Osborne said, “but we have had similar window strike pictures of barn owls for instance. Pigeons also have it and they can leave similar imprints. Smaller birds, for example starlings, sparrows, thrushes, which I have had as window strikes, don’t seem to leave much of an impression but this may be because they are less heavy and the collisions less ‘full on’.
“I think the important message is that, lovely as these images are, many birds are killed by window collisions and these are easily avoided.”
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