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Overview
Winner of the National Outdoor Book Award
For a quarter of a century, Tony Angell and his family shared the remarkable experience of closely observing pairs of western screech owls that occupied a nesting box outside the window of their forest home. The journals in which the author recorded his observations, and the captivating drawings he created, form the heart of this compelling book—a personal account of an artist-naturalist’s life with owls. Angell’s extensive illustrations show owls engaged in what owls do—hunting, courting, raising families, and exercising their inquisitive natures—and reveal his immeasurable respect for their secret lives and daunting challenges.
Angell discusses the unique characteristics that distinguish owls from other bird species and provides a fascinating overview of the impact owls have had on human culture and thought. He also offers detailed scientific descriptions of the nineteen species of owls found in North America, as well as their close relatives elsewhere. Always emphasizing the interaction of humans and owls, the author affirms the power of these birds to both beguile and inspire.
“Endearing…provides a lot of fascinating information about these reclusive creatures.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Angell writes (and draws) with the absolute authority of one who has studied, rehabilitated, lived with and loved the animals his whole life.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Steeped in the tradition of Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon, it blends taxonomy, ornithology, biogeography and autobiography.”—Times Literary Supplement
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300213744 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/11/2020 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 203 |
| Sales rank: | 97,877 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The House of Owls
By Tony Angell
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Tony AngellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21374-4
CHAPTER 1
The House of Owls
Late in the summer of 1969, my wife and I moved to our first home, north of Seattle, Washington. This was an older house far from the city, in a location that had at one time been a northern destination for a Lake Washington ferry. The remoteness had preserved two streams that coursed through our neighborhood, both of which still hosted runs of salmon each fall. Kingfishers as well as green and great blue herons fished the waterways, and we could find footprints of long-tailed weasel, mink, otter, and coyote along the banks. It was something of an oasis, and even today some of this natural heritage remains intact.
By the end of the year we had settled into our home, and soon discovered what a severe winter storm can do to comb out the decayed limbs and snags of an older forest. When an intense storm hit, we got our first listen to the wind roaring through the boughs of the cedar, hemlock, and fir. The dead wood cracked and snapped. In this tempest, the ground shook when an ancient snag lost its footing and plunged to the floor of the woods.
That night, to get a feel for it all close at hand, I went out from our porch to the rain-swollen creek only a hundred feet away. The winds bore down and, as if to catch a breath for a moment, paused between the surges. At one of these intervals I heard something. It was one of those sounds that, while familiar, I couldn't consciously recognize. I cupped my ear to hear it again as another wave of wind raged through the trees, and nothing could be heard over the din. An interval of relative quiet and there it was again: a persistent, soft, and mellow sound. In spite of the night's fury, it was a western screech owl singing to advertise its territory, the same song I had listened to as a child more than twenty years before. Perhaps there was a nest here.
The storm passed, and the following morning I set out hopefully to search the woods for the bird's nesting site. The hunt was brief. A hemlock snag had been felled by the night's wind, and in a portion of its broken top a flicker had excavated a cavity that was split open. In the fractured nest, there were breast feathers from a western screech owl. This was certainly one of the nest sites the little owl had been declaiming about the night before, and perhaps the female had already been in it. This valuable piece of woodland real estate was now useless to the owls.
It was December, early enough that I thought to put up a nesting box for the birds, hoping they might breed close by. I set to work and hastily constructed a box from cedar fencing and an apple crate. What I lacked in precision I made up for with nails and an ample amount of wood. Although not a showpiece, it would go up in a hurry and not be easily storm-damaged unless an entire tree went down. The one aspect I was careful about was the diameter of the entry hole near the top of the box face beneath the slanted roof, which measured about three inches (seven and a half centimeters). I knew the owl would be partial to an opening that fit its body and matched that of the flicker's nest.
The box measured sixteen inches (forty centimeters) high, with the cavity inside a little over a foot from the bottom of the entry. The four vertical sides were twelve inches wide (thirty centimeters). I added a sprinkling of wood shavings to the interior to provide comfort to a brooding owl. I hauled the fifteen-pound box up twenty feet and permanently secured it to the massive trunk of the cedar next to our bedroom window. It faced southeast, and I christened it "the Fortress." We just had to wait and see whether the owls might occupy it.
January. The New Year arrived; the box had been in place for two weeks. Nearly every night I heard bits of owl calls bubbling up from different locations in the woods. Nonmigratory, these owls remain in their territories throughout the year, so I assumed the owl was making the rounds and defining its boundaries. This behavior continued through the month. It was not until February that the owl made it clear the Fortress was an acceptable nesting site.
February. By four in the afternoon on cloudy days it was already dark, and when I stepped out for a quick stroll along the creek I walked into a stream of owl singing that was clearly up-tempo. The accelerated song seemed to radiate a very determined declaration that the male was in residence and had property to show. It was a rhythmic and sustained "Whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo ... whoowhoowhoowhoowhoowhoo" The song accelerated in its rate, and was best described with the oft-used simile "like a bouncing ball." The intervals between the whoos decreased until I heard them as a roll of continuous sound.
It was easy to discover the owl, because he was but a few steps from our porch, perched on the roof of the nesting box. As I stood on the path below, the owl reared upright and puffed up his bright white throat patch and changed his muted appearance into a demonstrative display. Thrusting his body forward, he pitched his musical proclamation into the recesses of the darkening forest. Repeatedly he sang his short song, each time turning in a different direction, then pausing for a few seconds to catch his breath and probably listen for a reply. When the owl turned my way, the white feathers of his expanded throat seemed to be illuminated and put the focus directly on the performer like a spotlight. "Here I am," the bird declared. "Look at me!" There was cause for celebration in our house, because here was a sign that we were to have a new neighborhood family move in.
A heavy, wet snow had fallen, but the chill and breaking branches seemed to make no difference to the owl. When the light faded, the owl went to work. His calls increased in intensity and frequency. At two o'clock one morning, with my bedroom window wide open, I was roused by the bird's calls. His bouncing-ball song was incessant. After a few minutes I started to count each sequence. In a span of two hours, at a rate of eight calls a minute, he had produced nearly a thousand individual runs of his song. In fact, this was only the beginning, as the owl continued to sing throughout the night and into daybreak.
One had to be in awe of the owl's energetic commitment to courtship. Ahead, of course, was the big test of convincing a mate that he was a partner fit to supply adequate food for her and their brood. Would a female accept the Fortress as a suitable site to raise their young? She would make the choice. I couldn't help but draw some comparisons with rituals of human romance. After nearly a month of effort by the owl, would this all be in vain?
As I sat on my porch two nights later, I heard a reply to the singer above me. The call was lower in pitch and softer, but unmistakably a bouncing-ball call. The two birds continued to sing back and forth through the night, all in the general area of the nesting box. Eventually the songs grew so close together that they became a duet.
March. By the middle of March the nesting box had met the approval of the female, and the two owls were defending the perimeter of their territory. They had altered the advertising call with an occasional bark, and directed their exclamations across our yard toward the road parallel to our property. From the other side of the road came an equally vigorous series of calls from another pair of owls. It seemed to be a border dispute akin to two human neighbors arguing over where the property lines were drawn. On the other hand, perhaps the box I had placed was such a hot item that more than one pair was competing for it. I would never know, since a second night of competitive scolding did not occur.
As I watched one late afternoon, the male owl landed on the box with a house rat in its beak, entered the box, and reemerged without his catch. I judged that the female might have been in the box already, unless the rat was left for her as a further demonstration ofhis prowess as a hunter and provider. Gifts like this were an integral part of the western screech owl's courtship, along with the mutual preening I frequently saw.
Mutual preening was often a prelude to mating. The pair would move along a perch and converge, the female leaning forward to expose the nape of her neck to the male. The male responded with eyes shut, to nuzzle down into his mate's soft plumage.
After the male groomed the female, she extended herself flat over her perch, and the male would in turn flutter up to suspend himself above her, steadying himself with a grip on her nape and flapping his wings. The coition was over in only a few seconds. Mating was a good deal more than just ritual, and occurred more than once during the course of the night.
April. The buds on the magnolia tree threatened to burst, obstructing the view to the Fortress. Although the owls could fly directly up into the cavity, the foliage of the adjacent tree provided some shade from the direct sunlight that came as spring advanced. It was the second week of April, and only the male called occasionally from afar. I heard him bark in protest at something unseen in the shrouded woods. He was on watch, and the female was in the box beginning to lay her clutch.
I confirmed that the female owl was on eggs by climbing to the box. Keeping my intrusion as limited as possible, I maneuvered my hand into the box. Its diameter restricted my entry to as far as my wrist, which was far enough as it elicited a sound like chattering teeth as the owl snapped her beak at me. Although not impenetrable, this box was a fortress that raccoons and opossums would find impossible to enter very deeply. Whereas inspecting the eggs was a temptation, further exploration could well have encouraged abandonment and discouraged subsequent nesting in years to come.
The forest canopy had thickened appreciably. Varied thrushes sang fervently from the tops of the tallest Douglas firs, and the robins hit their first notes of the dawn chorus of passerines. Our daughters were as excited as we were to learn that an owl family seemed to be under way. We watched as the male made several visits to the box each night with food parcels for the brooding female. Mice, crayfish, a single songbird—all were delivered to the hungry mate.
The nights were quiet, save for the yip-yip of the neighborhood coyote. I reminded myselfthat it was reasonable for the owls to keep a low profile while the eggs were being brooded, and later as the vulnerable youngsters were maturing. I considered myself the expectant father pacing outside the delivery room, and was about to climb to the box to inquire when I noticed a familiar form amid the snarl in an adjacent Douglas fir. The male had moved his day roost even closer to the nest to maintain his watch. His presence assured me that the female was safe inside and the hatching was imminent.
Steller's jays woke me one morning. There's a unique pitch I believe they reserve for predators they particularly disdain, owls among them. Going outside I found the jays and triangulated from their postures to discover the male roosting inconspicuously. The jays spent nearly half an hour scolding before they moved off. The male was still there when I checked late in the afternoon, and his reluctance to flush from the cover suggested a strong attachment to this place, which allowed a direct line of sight to the box.
The female now called to the male at all hours with her faint whinny begging solicitation. If the male didn't respond she increased the intensity of her calls and gave them more frequently. I watched her mate move in response directly above the box to roost in the magnolia, but he made no attempt to hunt. Still she cried, incidentally alerting a chorus of small birds, which began to mob the male.
When mobbed, the resident male and female paid little attention to the smaller birds. With a tree to his back the owl appeared to be sleeping, as black-capped and chestnut-backed chickadees led a charge flying back and forth over the owl. A cluster of bush tits took a top-row perch to offer high-pitched, wispy calls. Some of them appeared naive about the owl's location, looking out in the wrong direction, still scolding. The mobbing served an important purpose to these woodland species, because it introduced the owl as a possible predator to those birds that had little or no experience with it. I suspected this was also an opportunity for some of the male mobbers to demonstrate their fitness by confronting the owl. And while the clamor did little in this situation to move the owl out of the neighborhood, it did identify his location and that of the nest. An incident like this would impress the smaller birds, and they would remember it as a place to avoid.
Early May. In the first week of May, the female suddenly made an appearance in the entry to the nesting box. It had been more than three weeks since I had seen her, and I guessed that the eggs were hatched. Seeing me, she remained in place, feathers puffed up to fill the dark entrance with her body. When she closed her eyes to mere slits, her form blended into the matching background of the surrounding wooden box and tree bark, and she was nearly invisible. A few days later I heard soft chirping calls accompany the female's constant whinny reminders to bring home the bacon. The young owls were in the nest. Our daughters came from the house to listen, and we watched the male arrive overhead, dimly silhouetted and holding food in his beak for the family. We celebrated with whispered "Hoorays!"
By the middle of the month the male owl was delivering food to the box every hour or so through the night. Over this time he shifted his roosts to all sides of the box and occasionally changed locations during the day. Although rarely in the same spot, he now remained perched within a radius of twenty-five feet of his brood.
Charting the course of the western screech's emergence as a family in our woods had instilled a concern for the birds' welfare that settled in with all the Angells. Every day, arriving home from school, our daughters would ask about the owls and check on the nest box. Friends would be introduced to our resident owls, and short summaries of their manner and habits would be shared. To a degree our well-being was measured by how the owls were doing, and our understanding of how the remaining wild community functioned here was predicated on the birds' presence. That our experience had fostered a recognition of our capacity for altruism was indisputable.
The male is the sole provider for the family until the last few weeks before the young ones fledge. I worried about the possibility that something would befall the male and the entire family would starve. My imagination would occasionally get out of hand to the point that I considered trapping mice or getting a colony of them to raise in case such a calamity should occur. Finding road-killed owls as I did from time to time throughout the year, I was reminded of the mortality of these birds, even though the far greater percentage of such fatalities is among the young owlets, not adults. In any case, I would routinely look for the roosting male each morning to assure myself he was safely on watch and prepared to hunt through the night.
Early one afternoon the calls from the young and the female in the box grew loud enough to be heard from inside our house. I went outside in time to see the female bolt from the box, wings aflutter, to approach the male on his roost. He didn't budge and appeared indifferent to her solicitation. He actually appeared to be feigning sleep. She was having none of this apathy and took a step forward to soundly chest-bump him. Knocked off balance, he stood upright and wide-eyed, and she bumped him again, sufficient to knock him off the end of the limb and into flight to the woods. It was several hours before sundown, but I was sure the owl's night of hunting had begun.
Last Week of May. It had been three weeks since the owlets began hatching. I was certain by their calls there were at least two hatchlings. On a very warm midday the female occupied the nest entry panting visibly. I imagined that the box interior could grow uncomfortably warm. As I watched, she still gripped the bottom of the nest entry as she sprawled down to rest her head on the box perch below. Unmoving, she looked like an enormous gray banana slug as she dozed there, probably seeking relief from the muggy interior of the box.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The House of Owls by Tony Angell. Copyright © 2015 Tony Angell. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Robert Michael Pyle, ix,Preface, xv,
Acknowledgments, xvii,
ONE The House of Owls, 1,
TWO About Owls, 35,
THREE Owls and Human Culture, 71,
FOUR Owls in Company with People, 85,
FIVE Owls of Unique Habitat, 129,
SIX Owls of Wild and Remote Places, 167,
Bibliography, 187,
Illustration Credits, 193,
Index, 195,
Interviews
“Evolution has exquisitely designed owls for their lives as predators. They possess memories of place that are so keen they can maneuver expertly through the branches of trees in near total darkness. They are inquisitive, passionate, aggressive, deceptive, and at times quite valiant creatures. They experience pleasure and fear, and form inseparable pair bonds. As we humans make our impact felt on ecosystems and further pollute our planet, these birds are among the most vulnerable to the changes. The drawings and narratives here all grow directly from first-hand experiences with a number of owl species, but it is only by considering them in the context of the environmental conditions owls face that they become truly meaningful.”—from the Preface, The House of Owls
Praise for In the Company of Crows and Ravens by John Marzluff and Tony Angell:
"Learning how to slow down and observe animals around us is one simple way to form a stronger bond with nature. In the Company of Crows and Ravens is a subtle and beautiful reminder of this simple truth."—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Beautifully illustrated and produced. . . . As gripping and difficult to put down as any good work of fiction."—Alex Kacelnik, Nature
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