Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe
By Carl Safina
W. W. Norton & Company | 2023 | 384 pages
The Wise Hours: A Journey Into the Wild and Secret World of Owls
By Miriam Darlington
Tin House Books | 2023 | 336 pages
If nature writing is ever to engage and motivate its readers, it must “replicate the intensity of a personal relationship,” argued Jonathan Franzen in his essay “The Problem of Nature Writing.”
Carl Safina’s Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe and Miriam Darlington’s memoir, The Wise Hours: A Journey into the Wild and Secret World of Owls, take up this challenge and succeed brilliantly. Each work, grounded in natural history and perceptive observation, tells an intensely personal and even revelatory tale.
Alfie and Me offers an enchanting account of an orphaned owl who is raised by the author and his wife, Patricia. It is also a deeply researched rumination on the human treatment of nature, a dark tale of ignorance and desecration.
Renowned ecologist Carl Safina is the author of numerous articles and books, including, most recently, Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, a New York Times Notable Book for 2020. Audubon magazine recognized Safina as one of its 100 Notable Conservationists of the 20th century.
When a bedraggled baby bird arrived at Safina’s home—someone had found the chick on the ground, with no nest in sight—she was indiscernible as an owl and covered in fly eggs that “in a matter of hours… would hatch; maggots would tunnel into the bird. The poor chick was about to be eaten alive.”
Safina’s relationship with the Eastern screech owl, he writes, is “a story of profound beauties and magical timing harbored within a year upended.” Forced by the Covid-19 pandemic to spend months at home, he formed a bond with the owl that was both companionable and trusting. This unexpected connection, Safina writes, opened his senses to a broader, more vital realm, a “parallel reality adjacent to our human experience.”
Safina relates a daily existence that’s comfortably intertwined with the natural world. When it’s time to stock the freezer for winter, he arises at 2:30 in the morning to fish the dark waters off Long Island. Late-autumn chowder requires clamming at dawn: “with waders and rake I went to worship at the corner of mudflat and first light.”
The author charts, with obvious pride, the young owl’s robust recovery and development. Soon after the belated emergence of her flight feathers, she was “easily and swiftly maneuvering through doorways and turning tight curves within rooms.” In an effort to “nurture a housebound hunter’s body and mind,” he enticed her with toy mice on a string and loosed crickets in the house for her to hunt.
When physically Alfie appeared ready for release, the author faced a quandary: “We loved having her around,” Safina writes. “And she didn’t mind the only life she’d ever known. But it was a human’s kind of life, not an owl’s life. For a young owl it was a safe, healthy, pleasant dead end.” Did she have the skills, he wondered, to survive in the wild? If released, would she simply fly off, only to starve to death?
It was Alfie, he writes, who chose to keep one foot in the wild and the other in the human world. She roosted in the backyard trees, and through a series of whinnies and trills maintained continual contact with the author. Almost every evening, she’d swoop down to accept a frozen-thawed mouse or a dollop of raw bluefish.
Some of the book’s loveliest scenes depict Alfie’s courtship with a wild owl. Safina tells of how “Plus-One,” as he’s affectionately referred to, would catch moths and offer them to Alfie, and describes how the two owls strengthened their bond by mating. Safina writes, “this young honeymooning couple went right at it with few preliminaries. A lot of sex.”
Safina depicts himself moving inexorably into the owls’ world. When Alfie’s fledgling chicks (collectively known as “the Hoo”) moved out of the nest, the author—much like a new parent, monitoring his child’s every waking moment—took a sleeping bag outside, covered himself in mosquito netting, and began spending his nights near the owlets. On more than one occasion, when they failed to return to their usual roosting site, he donned night-vision binoculars to search the woods.
When Safina asks us to re-engage with the natural world, it is both a warning and a plea. He writes, “[Each] time we toss a soft broken thing overboard so as to cope and move on, we harden ourselves just a bit. And the harder we become, the more of our own life we cast away. Alfie took on the rigors and dangers of her own life but remained always open to us. I like to think I learned something.”
Miriam Darlington is a British nature writer who contributes to The Times, The Guardian, and The Ecologist. A professor of creative writing at the University of Plymouth in South Devon, she is the author of the 2009 memoir Otter Country: An Unexpected Adventure in the Natural World, which was released in the United States by Tin House in February 2024.
The Wise Hours details her quest, first through Great Britain, and then into Serbia, Finland, Spain, and France, in search of 13 iconic owl species. The memoir, while informed by science, natural history, human history, and mythology, also describes an emotional pilgrimage: inexplicably, Darlington’s 19-year-old son, Benji, became afflicted with “an illness that was so unusual, so difficult to diagnose and then to treat, that its unfolding had a seismic effect on us.” She writes: “my story became braided with two ecologies—the ornithological and the personal.”
Each chapter of the memoir focuses on a particular owl species. Darlington covers the barn owl, tawny owl, little owl, long-eared owl, short-eared owl, Eurasian eagle-owl, pygmy owl, and snowy owl. For each species, Darlington discusses physical attributes, hunting techniques, and favored prey. She describes nesting habits and migratory patterns and looks at the unique threats each faces. Like Safina, she offers some historical context for our relationship with these animals: owls, she writes, have inhabited Earth for more than 60 million years. Humans have been around for less than 200,000.
Darlington shows how these predators continue to thrive in regions where old-fashioned farming practices remain the norm, and she depicts a rural village whose economy has been bolstered by ecotourism (i.e., owl-watching). She offers plenty of surprising detail, as well: Who knew that a male eagle-owl hoots some 600 times a night during mating season? That pygmy owls could not survive without woodpeckers? Or that, in the 1980s, a group of nearly 400 snowy owls overwintered at Boston’s Logan Airport, surviving on the abundance of rodents and birds that lived in the short grass of the airfield?
Darlington depicts the owls in prose both muscular and lyrical. The pygmy owl, which survives in a pristine, forested preserve near the French Alps, is lauded as “a predator that would fit inside a coffee cup but could fight woodpeckers for their nests with all the va-va-voom of a double espresso.” The eagle-owl is admirable in its fierceness: “Its jugular-crushing talons and flesh-ripping bill appear to be forged from cast iron and sharpened to scimitar points.” The elusive snowy owl becomes “a deity of the north, an icon of desolate, boggy, lichen-clad plains, forest edges, rocky promontories, and shores edged with sea ice.”
Darlington’s writing offers readers a sense of hope. In her informative chapter on the barn owl, she explains how this species coexisted with humans for centuries, taking advantage of “lightly grazed pasture… thick with native grasses perfect for the tunnels and nests of small rodents, particularly field voles.” Rural life, however, has changed; due to intensive farming, the use of rodenticides, and a proliferation of two-lane roads through the countryside, the owls’ numbers have plummeted: fewer than 5,000 pairs remain in Britain. Darlington suggests a way forward: she tells of “pioneering conservation schemes” where strychnine and other poisons are being replaced by owl predation. She describes how the Barn Owl Trust, with help from enthusiastic farmers, installs nest boxes and conserves habitat.
The author’s own encounters with wild owls have a fresh, unfiltered quality. Darlington writes of a rainy afternoon when she wandered into an abandoned barn and discovered an owl chick on the ground. Knowing the owlet would never survive the night, she returned it to the nest, high on a ledge. “I expected it to smell like a kitten but its alien stink of rotting mouse, vole blood, and acrid ammonia hurt my nose. There was something part-reptile there….”
The struggle for survival begins early: barn owls, she writes, lay their eggs “at intervals” and if there’s insufficient food for the chicks, the larger, older ones “might devour their weaker, more recently hatched siblings, swallowing them down whole.” The avoidance of sentimentality lends credibility to her narrative.
Her discussions of owl mythology and the superstitions surrounding these birds are enthralling. She reflects on why the tawny owl was long considered a bad omen. She writes, “The disembodied shriek, the black eyes that seem to stare into your soul, and the ghoulish swoop can combine to bring the darkest regions of our imaginative superstition and folklore to life.”
One of the book’s most dramatic and poignant tales concerns an eagle-owl that in 2016 took up residence in the university town of Exeter. These birds are not considered native to the United Kingdom. Was this a wild owl, Darlington asks, that had somehow managed to fly across the Channel or the North Sea? Was it an escaped pet? Had it been brought in to rid the area of pesky seagulls, then abandoned? The owl’s “booming two-tone hoot” got on the nerves of students. Worse still, it pounced on unsuspecting passersby: “often it struck from behind, worryingly, as if it was attempting to sever the neck vertebrae, as it would with its normal prey.”
Darlington asks us to step back and consider not the owl’s ferocity, but its unnatural and tragic situation. She writes, “The owl was reduced to a misfit, pathetically confused, either mistakenly hunting, looking for a mate during the breeding season, or chasing people away from city streets, a battle it could never win.” A reader cannot help but reflect on the fate of this animal, and by extension, all the owls introduced in this superb memoir.
Tucker Coombe writes about nature and conservation from Cincinnati, Ohio and Chatham, Massachusetts. Her work has been published in Brevity, The Rumpus, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In her spare time she trains dogs, keeps bees, and gardens with a focus on native plants and wildlife.
Header photo of Eurasian pygmy owl by Erik Karits, courtesy Pixabay.
