MANKIND’s fascination with owls is age-old. Wall paintings in a cave in south-west France depict a pair of snowy owls and their chicks that last preyed on small mammals and regurgitated pellets some 15,000 years ago. The Stone Age artist who sketched those pale contours died millennia before the author of the book of Leviticus cautioned against avian predators that the Bible categorises as “an abomination”: carrion-eaters including “the owl, and the nighthawk, and the cuckoo… and the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl”. In the Cave of the Trois-Frères, snowy owls, deftly chipped into the rockface, take their place in a fearsome inventory of hunter-gatherers and grazing beasts that includes bison, lions and a wounded bear vomiting blood.
