If owls are to be part of our future, we must acknowledge their presence and significance to us. As an artist and naturalist, I cannot imagine life without them. This book gives us a better understanding of how important owls are to the integrity of humans and in nature.
A Little Owl may look cute to the human observer, but to a mouse in the grass it is a terrifying predator.
OWL ENCOUNTERS ARE ALWAYS SPECIAL. My most memorable came while camping on a remote island in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. After whiling away the midday heat by stick-scribbling in the sand some of the wildlife I hoped to see—a hippo, a giraffe, and a big-eyed bird—my guide, a fisherman who spoke little English but who had clearly been paying attention, beckoned me to follow him. We tramped through a shallow lagoon to a tangle of forest, where he stopped and pointed up into a towering sycamore fig tree. It took me two minutes with binoculars before I spotted what his sharper eyes had seen immediately: a huge, ginger-orange owl staring from its roost, its inky-black eyes wide in suspicion. It was my first Pel’s Fishing Owl, the African birder’s holy grail.
Owl encounters need not be deep in the African bush. My childhood in the United Kingdom was littered with memorable moments: hearing the shrill hoot and “kiwick” of duetting Tawny Owls, a bird I had hitherto encountered only in books, outside my bedroom window; and watching Short-eared Owls quartering a winter marsh, then finding their pellets beneath a fence post and carefully extracting four perfect vole skulls. Something about these enigmatic birds commands attention and fires the imagination, which is why owls have loomed large in human culture across the ages.
That “something” is not hard to break down. First, owls are largely nocturnal and so carry all the mystery of creatures that move unseen in darkness, betrayed only by their unearthly calls. Second, when owls make themselves visible, their large, forward-facing eyes give them more of a “face” than other birds: a face upon which we cannot resist bestowing such human qualities as anger, surprise, and wisdom. And third, perhaps, are their hunting skills, deployed in pitch darkness with such stealth and perception that it fills observers with awe. In some places, awe has become fear. Traditional cultures have long associated owls with sinister forces. Similar myths recur, from African villages to Mediterranean olive groves: typically, that an owl’s presence, or even just its call, near a human dwelling foretells a death in the family or some such disaster. Elsewhere, though, owls have come to embody more positive qualities, including wisdom and prosperity. This association runs from the ancient Greek reverence for the Little Owl as companion of the goddess Athene to the role of owls in such literary classics as Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels.
Today, the allure of the owl is also reflected in the work of many wildlife photographers who are drawn to this challenging subject. It is an allure celebrated here in David Tipling’s stunning images, and those of the other photographers he has assembled. Famously, it is a calling that also led to the loss of an eye for pioneering British photographer Eric Hosking, attacked by a female Tawny Owl whose nest site he was trying to photograph. Owls may be beautiful, but you underestimate them at your peril.
Owls in order
An owl—to allay the fears of the superstitious—is simply a bird. However, it is a bird uniquely adapted to the challenges of a predatory and mostly nocturnal lifestyle. In scientific terms, owls make up the Strigiformes, one of twenty-eight orders of bird. Although equipped with piercing talons and hooked bills, they are unrelated to diurnal birds of prey, such as eagles and hawks, which belong to the Falconiformes, an entirely separate order. The fossil record suggests that owls first appeared some 65 to 56 million years ago, and are among the oldest known groups of non-Galloanserae land birds (the Galloanserae are the game birds and wildfowl that emerged even earlier). Many species have since come and gone: one barn owl from the Pleistocene stood 3 feet (1 m) tall and may have weighed twice as much as today’s largest eagle owls.
Today’s owls fall into two families: the barn owls (Tytonidae) and the typical owls (Strigidae). Between them, these comprise some twenty-six genera and up to 250 species. The taxonomy has undergone extensive revision since the advent of DNA sequencing, producing new genera and prompting the movement of numerous species between existing genera. For example, the African fishing and Asian fish owls, each once assigned its own separate genus, are today grouped with eagle owls in Bubo. Conversely, the New World screech owls, once classified alongside Old World scops owls in Otus, now have their own genus, Megascops. Molecular studies and improved analyses of vocalizations have also brought to light the existence of many new species and have led scientists to elevate to full species status many owls that were previously thought to be geographical variations (subspecies) of existing species. The whole business of taxonomy is complex and contentious, and it remains a work in progress. This book reflects the taxonomy that is accepted by most authorities at the time of going to print, but new owl species are added to the list as research continues.
Owls depicted as cultural icons in a Punch cartoon from 1888, an Ancient Greek coin, and a clay plaque from Iraq, c. 1792–1750 BCE.
Taxonomy aside, you need not be a scientist to appreciate the extraordinary variety among owls. They range in size from the bijou Elf Owl, which at 1.4 ounces (40 g) is no larger than a sparrow, to the formidable Eurasian Eagle Owl, which, at a top weight of 10.1 pounds (4.6 kg), is big enough to kill a young deer. Owls occur on every continent except Antarctica, with 68 percent of species found in the southern hemisphere. The majority are forest birds, adapted to hunting among trees, which also provide them with nest sites and roosts. However, owls also thrive in savannas, deserts, and even the Arctic tundra, each with its own particular survival adaptations. Some species have evolved to live alongside humans, in agricultural and even urban landscapes; the Barn Owl gets its name for a reason.
Owls up close
It is easy to recognize an owl. Although individual species may be hard to tell apart, the big head, round face, and forward-facing eyes make all owls instantly recognizable as such and immediately distinguish them from other birds. In order to appreciate just how unusual these predators are, however, you need to take a closer look.
An owl’s distinctive face holds several clues to its unusual way of life. The eyes are proportionally among the largest of any animal—up to 2.2 times the size of those of similar-size birds—and, in the largest species, larger even than our own eyes. They are more tubular than spherical, thereby allowing the maximum area for the retina, which is packed with the rods that allow the acute low-light sensitivity required to operate in near-darkness (although owls do not have high-resolution color vision). Forward-facing, like human eyes, these eyes also provide the binocular vision essential for depth perception when targeting prey. You will often see an owl bob and weave its head, in order to improve this focus. However, you will not see it turn its eyes, as they are locked into their sockets by sclerotic