Barn owl tale takes flight in new book

The story of the life of a barn owl from Teesdale has been told in a new book.

Former teacher and writer, Tracey Iceton, was inspired to tell the tale of Sparky, an owl she adopted from a Teesdale animal rescue centre, where she volunteered about four years ago.

The rescue centre was based at Thorpe Farm adjacent to the A66.

It is the author’s fifth book, all of which have been a blend of fact and fiction.

Sparky was about five years old when she arrived at the centre.

Tracey said: “She was obviously a captive-bred, hand-reared, imprint barn owl.

“She was tame and she had a leg ring on, so she wasn’t from the wild.

“I don’t know the truth of where she came from and I will probably never know.”

She called in the expertise of nearby falconer and birds of prey expert Ben Potter. Ben also agreed to let

Tracey keep Sparky on his property with all of his other birds.

The writer said: “Ben came up and saw her, he said yes, she is young and she is an imprint, she needs to be worked with and she needs to be with people.

“It was very generous of him to help but he just loves birds and he wouldn’t see anything bad to happen to her if he could help it.

“We just kept flying her here and Ben just kept encouraging me. I couldn’t surrender her to anyone else after what she had already been through. I don’t know where she was for five years, what kind of life she lived.”

Tracey contacted the independent bird registry where her leg ring is registered and found out Sparky had been bred in captivity.

Tracey said: “But because of data protection they couldn’t give me anything other than the breeder sold her to a lady in Cumbria.

“She could have been with the same person for five years, she could have been with multiple people.”

Her decision to write the book came when she attended a writer’s conference in 2023.

The author said: “It is a mixture of both. I went to a writing conference in 2023 and a chap there was talking about creative writing as a missed opportunity to explore animals perspective on life.

“What people tend to do when they write about animals is they make them into humans with fur or feathers. I wanted to find a way of writing as a barn owl looking out into the human world and living as part of the human world.”

The result is sections that are from the owl’s perspective and others that are from her own viewpoint, and the different way they have interpreted their interactions together.

There are also parts of the book that are “now”, which are almost a memoir of their meeting and their life together, and parts that are “then” which are from Sparky’s past as imagined by the author.

Explaining her idea of how the owl views the world, Tracey said: “In the Sparky sections I have played around with language a bit to try find a way of writing that might conceivably be how a barn owl would use language if it had language.

“Barn owls don’t have arms, they have wings, so in the book I am holding out a featherless wing, because why would she know the word arms, she doesn’t have arms.

“I played around with language to try and find a way of expressing what the world would be like to be a barn owl living in the company of humans.”

Sparky – My Barn Owl Story, is published by Cinnamon Press and is available from Amazon in paperback or Kindle digital format.