It was an ordinary tree in an ordinary street in a Hungarian town in winter. Our guide, Bela, instructed us to gather underneath it and look up. We tipped our heads and gazed up into the conifer’s canopy. All I saw was rough bark, needles growing in fractal clumps, dead twigs, patches of sky. For the longest time it was only tree. Then, with a hot shock of surprise, it was not. A patch of bark resolved into a long-eared owl. And then another. Then more. All were roosting with their eyes closed and faces screwed tight, taloned feet gripping branches beneath long, ash-streaked feathers that looked wrought of wood. There must have been 15 owls in that single tree, where at first I saw no owls at all.
It was a lesson in how astonishingly effective animal camouflage can be. The plumages of ground-nesting birds like woodcock and nightjars perfectly mimic dead leaves, fallen twigs and grass. The zig-zag black and silver scales of adders might, on a plain background, be bright as a new five-pence piece, but they make the snake vanish in sun-striped heathland. Ringed parakeets glow absurdly green in full sun but become invisible in leaves.
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