‘A tawny owl swoops round your head, there is a background scutter of twitchings and scratchings from the depths of cages, a crow called Brian screeches incessantly… the room is suffused with a limey smell.’ In 1984, the Observer’s regular Room of My Own feature got more than it bargained for on a visit to Stanley Clapham’s Victorian terrace in Tooting Bec. Clapham, an architect and adviser on historic buildings for Surrey planning department, had a second life running ‘an ornithological refugee camp’, taking in injured and abandoned birds. Clapham greeted the journalist having just finished bathing his owls: ‘Something I didn’t know about owls until I kept them
→ Continue reading at The Guardian – Culture