Tawny Owl with Egg (Art Puzzle)

Title: “Tawny Owl with Egg (Art Puzzle)”

Life-sized handmade solid oak art puzzle (Limited Edition of 7)

First and foremost I want to mention that the eggs used in my work are not real – for obvious ethical reasons (it is also illegal to take wild birds eggs). They are life-size replicas made of a plaster resin composite and hand-painted – not by me, but by a very reputable leading replica birds eggs maker.

Tawny Owl

Following on from Guillemot with Egg (Jigsaw Puzzle) (see https://michaelautumn.wordpress.com/2020/03/01/guillemot-with-egg-art-puzzle/), I thought I would pay homage to another favourite bird of mine – the Tawny Owl (Strix aluco). These, like all owls, are very mysterious – especially the noctornal ones (which tawnies are) – because they do things the opposite to us: they sleep/rest during the daylight, and come out – and hunt – at night. They are supremely designed and adapted to this lifestyle: they have excellent hearing and eyesight, they fly almost silently, and their hunting strategy is to hunt in the darkness – when other small nocturnal animals think it’s safe to come out…!

Mice, voles, shrews, moles – in fact any small rodent up to the size of a rat – are largely nocternal to avoid daylight predators – like kestrels, buzzards, merlin, sparrowhawks. But while rummaging for food and going about their normal lives – in what they think is the relative safety of darkness – a tawny owl – alerted to their presence by their quiet, but inevitable, sounds – can swoop undetected near to the unwitting little creatures. From close by the tawny can watch their prey’s every move – until they decide to pounce, crush and puncture them with their razor-sharp tallons – and then invariably swallow them whole…

Little birds could be roosting or sleeping in trees or bushes, but if they make any sounds in their sleep – even just quietly snooring or sleep-calling/singing – they are easy game for these owls… Frogs, toads, newts – in fact any small reptile – making any kind of sound at night – are likely to court the deadly attention of a tawny owl. Even fish splashing about at the water’s surface, or in the shallows, are fair game for these owls…

Suffice to say that if it is small and it makes a noise, it is on the menu…! So I thought I would play with this idea and illustrate as many of the small creatures tawny owls eat – as jumbled up jigsaw pieces surrounding the main protagonist. The whole design slightly resembles a huge regurgitated pellet of the tawny owl, and the small prey animals are all jumbled up – like fragments in a pellet.

I like art in the form of a jigsaw puzzle because it is interactive, and by careful design of the shapes and carving on the pieces, I can get the puzzle-solver to look at, and think very carefully about, them – in a way that is simply not possible with non-interactive art. Indeed, someone could look at a piece of art like this and not even notice the small creatures surrounding the main owl – let alone have any understanding why they are there – and why these particular animals. However, trying to solve a puzzle like this is a very different matter – they will definitely think more about what it is they are looking at…!

I have deliberately made the jigsaw puzzle very subtle because Nature is very subtle. These creatures are very difficult to see because of their camouflage and because they mainly come out at night – and it is precisely because they are so difficult to see that the owls rely on the noise they make to home in on them… The puzzle metaphor lets me toy with the idea that these small creatures think they are invisible – or out of harm’s way – but to a tawny owl, in the dead calm of night, their sounds makes them highly visible…

Owls typically eat 2-4 mice-sized animals per day – so about a thousand a year. Without owls, goodness know how many mice, moles, voles, rats, small birds, newts, etc. there would be…! If all the creatures a tawny own ate over the course of its lifetime were put into a 30cm diameter (about the width of this jigsaw puzzle) very tall clear tube – I wonder how high the pile of eaten animals would be…

“Art Puzzle” series

At the risk of stating the obvious, this work is part of my Art Puzzle series. For readers interested, further details can be found at the originating work’s post @ https://michaelautumn.wordpress.com/2020/03/01/guillemot-with-egg-art-puzzle/

“Limited Edition” of 7

The phrase limited edition in this case is a bit of a misnomer. These are all individually handmade by me from my original design. I really wish there was, but there is no mechanical or chemical process I know of by which these can be reproduced – like screen printing, lithographs, card puzzles (using a die and jigsaw press), etc. (for more details please see the aforementioned post).

Working-on photos

Finished photos