What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds

by Jennifer Ackerman

“It’s a secret skill, and the more you do it, the better you become. If we were lucky enough to find an owl, my heart always skipped a beat. It was the most magical thing. Over the three or four years I did this, I found hundreds of owls, but it was still magic to me every time we found one, because they’re so well camouflaged and so shy.”

Dog detection may be a marginal method for locating owls. But the notion of one nonhuman animal species working to protect another strikes me as both moving and illuminating. That Max and Zorro can consistently succeed at detecting owls with just their olfactory expertise points to the many ways of knowing in the animal world that go beyond our own.

Southeastern Brazil is one of the world’s owl hot spots, with seventeen of the country’s twenty-six species.

When I ask Johnson why there’s such a diversity of owls in this region and other global hot spots—southern Asia, a swath of Arizona and Mexico, sub-Saharan Africa, China—he tells me it’s a synergy of two things. “These are some of the places that have been the most environmentally stable for the longest period of time, millions of years,” he says. “They’re also geographically varied, with different habitats.” They’re mostly in tropical regions that never experienced glaciation.

Johnson likes to say that there are two important days in life, the day you were born and the day you find out why.

Owls defy expectations. They show us that their family lives—their pairing and unpairing, their parenting and raising of their young—are far richer and more complicated than we thought. Sometimes the only way to see this is to listen.

It’s easy to love a living tree, with its lush foliage and canopy of greenery. But snags are like skeletons. They’ve lost their leaves, sloughed their skin. Their bones are furrowed with insect tracks, riddled with holes, rotted at the core, and their tops are stunted and snaggled. But what life they support! More than a hundred species of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians use snags for nesting, roosting, denning, and feeding, including these magnificent owls. Now when I see snags made into roadside guardrails and benches, displayed as hotel “totem poles,” or cut into cords and stacked neatly as firewood, I wonder at the loss.

The Greek goddess Athena kept a Little Owl as a sacred pet. In T. H. White’s novel The Sword in the Stone, Merlyn the magician enlists his companion owl Archimedes to help in the education of the Wart: “Merlyn took the Wart’s hand and said kindly, ‘You are young, and do not understand these things. But you will learn that owls are the most courteous, single-hearted and faithful creatures living. You must never be familiar, rude or vulgar with them, or make them look ridiculous. Their mother is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and, although they are often ready to play the buffoon to amuse you, such conduct is the prerogative of the truly wise. No owl can possibly be called Archie.’ ” In J. K. Rowling’s fictional universe, Harry Potter receives both mail and camaraderie from his pet Snowy Owl, Hedwig.

We see what we want to see. “We view them through our own lenses,” says Buhl. “We can’t help it. But we need to treat them not as mini-humans in feathers, but as their own entity, intrinsically what they are, their own ‘nation’ on this planet,” she says—her words echoing the great naturalist Henry Beston on all wild animals: “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.”

tournament shield in wood and burlap from Germany, circa 1500, showing a realistic owl surrounded by a motto that reads in translation: “Though I am hated by all birds, I nevertheless rather enjoy that.” If that isn’t an owly attitude, I don’t know what is.

few animals have such an immensely ambivalent and complex relationship with humankind. From folklore to art, they’ve been revered and reviled, deemed sage and stupid, coupled with destructive witchcraft and with healing. Sometimes they symbolize two opposing things at once. And sometimes they’re just . . . birds.

For owls, invisibility is a defense or disguise; for us, it’s a privilege, one that—if we’re lucky—may yield an owl sighting. Owls teach us what we can learn from an animal just by listening to it. They show us how distinctive they are as individuals, idiosyncratic, with as much personality as we have, and with a full range of feelings and emotions often expressed in deeply understated ways. They tell us that to get at their truths, we need to understand them over time. It’s not enough to seek quick glimpses. We think we know something about them, and then—poof!—they dispel our theories, offering up bent or broken rules and unexpected qualities.