What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Bird
By Jennifer Ackerman
Penguin Press 2023

The many, many fans of Jennifer Ackerman’s 2016 bestseller The Genius of Birds were likely bird-people, if not actual birders then certainly bird-curious, and those readers might have dreamed that this author would some day turn her attention specifically to one of the most charismatic of all birds, the owl. 

Those readers, and all the many thousands of others who’ve always been fascinated by these birds, will rejoice at the appearance of Ackerman’s new book, What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds. And since there have been many thousands of books about owls, those readers will be expecting certain things those books never skip. There’ll be the rattled-off fascinating factoids – owls can recognize each other by voice alone; owls can see well into the ultraviolet; owls don’t just use hearing to locate rustling prey, they calculate locations; only a third of owl species hunt at night; owls are “exceptionally dedicated parents,” and so on. 

Snowy Owls, Great Gray Owls, Saw-Whet Owls, Great Horned Owls, Eastern Screech Owls … all the most-recognizable species are here in these pages, in all their infinite variety. Not all owl-flight is silent; not all owls migrate in winter; many owls sleep literally with one eye open; some owls nest on the ground or under it; some feast on scorpions (after first snipping off the stingers, of course) … on this ‘did you know’ level, Ackerman’s book is predictable, although every bit as glowingly readable as everything else she’s written. 

There are ample profiles of the many scientists and specialists who dedicate their lives to tagging, tracking, and studying owls all over the world, and they too get that inimitable judicious Ackerman treatment. This is an author who knows perfectly how to shape the human dimensions of her narrative in such a way that they never interfere or overshadow her non-human stars. When she writes about researcher Laura Erickson, who cared for a “wildlife ambassador” Eastern Screech Owl named Archimedes, for instance, both she and Erickson yield the center stage to Archimedes when he dies:

“I like to imagine him free,” [Erickson] wrote in a tribune to him, “flying under the moon or alighting on a massive limb of a big, old elm, or peeking out of a Pileated Woodpecker hole in an aspen, or whinnying under the stars somewhere out there in the universe. I like to imagine that he’s shaken off his obligation to teach people things they should already understand about the ways of owls and the value of nature – shaken it off the way he’d shake out his feathers after preening, a spray of feather dust forming a sparkling halo around him.”

Owl biology and behavior are described in as much detail as 300 pages will allow, and Ackerman is always a lively guide to the contradictions that have always made these birds the focus of “an immensely ambivalent and complex relationship with humankind” (contradictions, and also their weirdly human-like direct gaze, which surely accounts for most of this relationship). “From folklore to art, they’ve been revered and reviled, deemed sage and stupid, coupled with destructive witchcraft and with healing,” Ackerman writes. “Sometimes they symbolize two opposing things at once. And sometimes they’re just … birds.” 

It’s an immensely enjoyable performance, although Ackerman is as aware as anybody that we humans understand only a fraction of what “just … birds” means. It’s been fifty years since Thomas Nagel’s famous paper “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?” appeared, and its resoundingly implied answer, “we will never know,” is every bit as true with owls, moreso, since owls are birds not mammals and evolved 20 million years earlier than bats. Owls endlessly fascinate humans; owls can befriend humans; owls certainly need the conservation help of humans. They can look us straight in the eyes, and they very much warrant a book as thoughtful and engrossing as this one, another great bird-book from Ackerman. But they keep plenty of secrets, without even intending to.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.