‘Owl-struck’ author tells what an owl knows
One of five sisters growing up in Washington, D.C., Jennifer Ackerman from age seven would set out before sunrise to observe birds along the Potomac with her father, who held a demanding job in government while nurturing a passion for every feathered thing that flew.
Owls-5-web.jpg
Jennifer Ackerman with the subject of her new book, “What an Owl Knows.”
Initially, they would listen. Then, Ackerman recalled, “once the sun came up, we could see what we were hearing.” Her father, trained by a birder who was almost blind, already had honed multiple senses for these explorations. The pre-dawn bird walks “were what you did if you wanted time with my dad,” Ackerman said in an interview, adding that he presented her with her first Roger Tory Peterson Field Guide by the famed ornithologist.
The seven-year-old’s inherited avian fascination turned into a life’s work. The bestselling author of “The Genius of Birds” and “The Bird Way” will be at the Little Washington Theatre Dec. 20 to discuss her latest work, “What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds.”
Visual and auditory
“Birds are the most present forms of wildlife that we have,” Ackerman said. “It’s visual and auditory.”
Because owls mostly hunt at night, tracking relies almost exclusively on hearing. “You go out in the dark and just listen,” Ackerman said, noting that “an ornithologist can pick up very distant very low hooting noises, or squawks and chitters.”
But owls hear far better than their human trackers. “Owls see what we don’t see,” Ackerman writes in her new book. “Hear what we don’t hear. Invite us to notice sights and sounds that might otherwise go unnoticed.”
Barn owls hunt in complete darkness, scoring precision strikes entirely on the basis of sound. The facial disk of a great gray owl, Ackerman writes, “is like one huge external ear, a feathered satellite dish for collecting sound.” Aging owls don’t need hearing aids, because they regenerate hair cells, maintaining keen hearing for life.
Beyond hearing an owl, beholding one in silent flight, or being in close proximity of one, can turn a scientist into an awestruck acolyte. Ackerman cited David Johnson, who encountered a western screech owl perched on his tent during a boyhood camping trip. Johnson concluded that “he had come and chosen me,” Ackerman said, adding that “this man has been studying owls for 50 years.”
Johnson now directs the Global Owl Project from Alexandria, coordinating more than 450 researchers around the world to conserve owl species, which number more than 260.
Ackerman’s first owl encounter featured the bird’s gruesome eating habits. After mounting an owl box on a silver maple just outside the kitchen window of her Charlottesville house, Ackerman and her two young daughters waited more than a year for a sighting from their breakfast table. What they eventually beheld was the owl chewing through the wing of a blue jay, and later an entire mourning dove.
Ackerman has been studying those who study owls — across multiple continents and climates. “I had a blast writing this book,” she said. “My favorite thing in all the world is traipsing around behind the scientists who are completely obsessed.
“I have to say that owl experts are really a breed in themselves,” she added. Inexplicably, owl trackers enjoy making puns. They might sing their own version of the Beatles’ tune: “Owl You Need is Love.” An owl that tended to dive-bomb joggers in Atlanta came to be called “Owl Capone.”
Messengers of bad news
Owls don’t always generate laugh lines. Ackerman is intrigued by the ways diverse cultures have interpreted owls over time. Many associate them with witchcraft, and research has shown that around the world, the most prevalent owl perception is that they are messengers of bad news.
Owls’ resilience and adaptability should trigger the opposite association. Owls’ ancestors ran with the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and the direct forebears of modern owls survived the asteroid that killed off the Paleocene superpowers. Unlike other creatures today, new owl species keep turning up — in places like the Andean mountains in northern Peru, or the island of Principe off the coast of Western Africa.
The striking thing about Ackerman’s study of owls (and other birds) is her determination to discover what it is like to be one. The title “What an Owl Knows” is a giveaway that her process involves more than observation through a set of strong binoculars. She tells us how an owl’s brain works, including the ways these mysterious night-hunters store and use knowledge.
The evolving science of birding helps. Researchers employ radio telemetry to learn where owls are roosting. To track the migratory routes of larger owls, scientists have attached transmitters that carry altimeters and communicate with satellites. With this technology, they tracked Snowy owls as they soared from Utqiagvik, Alaska to the northern coast of Siberia and back to Victoria Island in Canada.
Edge of mystery
Ackerman credits owls with the greatest “adaptability and ingenuity in making use of the human-shaped world.” But she also warns that urbanization, deforestation and agricultural development are reducing owls’ habitats to “island-like fragments.” Extinction risks are multiplying faster than the discovery of unfamiliar owl species.
As much as this writer knows, she isn’t sure what’s going to happen to the owls, or the people who surround them. In the end, her studies of owls remind her both of our shared capacity to survive, and our fragility. Owls, she writes near the end of her book, are messengers who tell us “that we are always perched on the edge of mystery.”
Three years ago, when Ackerman’s titles, awards and fellowships had multiplied, her work appearing in National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American, her aged father, and first teacher, was failing, limited by worsening dementia. Jennifer Ackerman found that “the one thing we could discuss pretty coherently was birds. It was a lifelong connection.”
Tim Carringtonis a reporter for Foothills Forum, a nonprofit organization that supports local news in Rappahannock County. He is also a member of the board of the Rappahannock Association for Arts and Community (RAAC).
Sign up for Rapp News Daily, a free newsletter delivered to your email inbox every morning.
