I bet that few to none of you readers has actually seen an Owl in the wild...................Two new books on Owls are reviewed below---ENIGIMA OF THE OWL AND OWLS.....................Both of these books investigate what are thought to be at least 200 species of this "caped-crusader" of birds.................Their ability to almost be invisible while in plain sight, their keen sense of hearing and their "cryptic plumage" make them the "invisible men of forest and field............"Owls are extraordinary hunters, “with the smallest owls punching well above their weight"............. "Many are also “intraguild predators,” which is a polite way of saying they eat other owls"................."Like silent movie stars, they have “faces".........”While most birds seem always in profile, owls have forward-facing eyes like our own"...................... "True, their eyeballs are fixed in bony sheaths, and they can turn their necks 270 degrees (which helps if you can’t move your eyes), but they look at you".............. "The familiar eloquence of their faces derives from something called a “facial disc,” the smooth, feathered, slightly concave surface that makes barn owls look like Marcel Marceau"......................"Another interesting fact about Owls is that one owl ear is higher than the other, which allows them to parse sounds and locations in subtle ways"

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The Glory of Owls

While most birds seem always in profile, owls have forward-facing eyes. Like silent movie stars, they have “faces.” Jonathan Rosen reviews “The Engima of the Owl” and “Owls.”

By

Jonathan Rosen

Updated April 7, 2017

Not many creatures associated with wisdom, death and magic are more exciting in person than legend, but a Great Gray Owl can hear a mouse stirring under a blanket of snow 30 feet away and catch it in darkness, making no sound until it breaks through the frozen crust with its talons. Even a burrowing owl standing near an appropriated prairie dog house on comically long legs, glaring as if you owe it money, has rare charisma. Watching birds is a pleasure; seeing an owl is an event.

But when was the last time you actually saw an owl? Not delivering the mail to wizards, not counting the licks of a Tootsie Pop, or staring out of a Hooters tee shirt with double-entendre eyes, but an actual owl in the flesh and feathers. They need to be seen to be believed.

THE ENIGMA OF THE OWL

By Mike Unwin & David Tipling

Y ale, 288 pages, $40

OWLS

By Marianne Taylor

HarperDesign, 256 pages, $50

The hard part is finding them. Although owls live on every continent but Antarctica, they famously fly at dusk (though not always) and their cryptic plumage lets them vanish even when perched at noon while you stare straight at them. Like the ability to fly in silence—owls can be feathered down to their toes—their ability to disappear is part of their mythic allure. It also helps explain why there are still more than 200 species

.How exciting is it to see an owl? After the pioneering British nature photographer Eric Hosking got too close to a nesting Tawny Owl in the 1930s and lost an eye to its talons, he was back at the nest 24 hours after getting out of the hospital—wearing a fencing mask.

Eastern Screech Owl

Though Hosking was unusually unflappable (he called his memoir “An Eye for a Bird”), owls have undeniable charisma, and you do not need a fencing mask to see most of them. Especially if you start with “The Enigma of the Owl: An Illustrated Natural History” or “Owls: A Guide to Every Species in the World.” Both books are excellent for armchair owling, general reference and the pleasure of looking at photographs of birds that manage uncannily to look like old friends transfigured by feathers—even with mice, frogs or snakes dangling from their beaks.

Written with lively, unforced erudition by nature writer Mike Unwin, “The Enigma of the Owl” is a beautiful book, with 200 extraordinary images of hunting, nesting, flying and perching owls. The superb photographs were either taken or collected by the renowned nature photographer David Tipling. Organized by bioregion, the book focuses on 53 species, from the tiny bug-catching Elf Owl—a “pocket predator” peeping out of a hole in a saguaro cactus—to the hulking Eurasian Eagle Owl, which can swallow a rabbit whole and has been known to kill a young deer. Biggest of all is Blakiston’s Fish Owl, which has a six-foot wingspan, weighs up to 10 pounds (a lot for a bird with hollow bones) and can carry a fish twice its own weight. Owls are extraordinary hunters, “with the smallest owls punching well above their weight.” Many are also “intraguild predators,” which is a polite way of saying they eat other owls.

Great-Horned Owl

In “Owls: A Guide to Every Species in the World,” Marianne Taylor, who is also the author of “Beautiful Owls” (2013), sets out to give every owl its due. She puts the number of species at “220 or so.” Mr. Unwin’s number is somewhat higher but there is room for disagreement; as Ms. Taylor notes in her excellent introduction, “many are still virtually unknown and have only ever been glimpsed by a lucky handful of people, much less properly observed and studied.” Ms. Taylor shares many of Mr. Unwin’s enthusiasms for the owlish “art of invisibility” and the more flamboyant features of their predatory prowess, along with his book’s concern for threatened habitat. The books even share a photograph of a Snowy Owl vomiting up an “owl pellet,” those hockey pucks of compressed fur, feathers and bones made of the indigestible parts of an owls’ diet that exit the way they entered.

The bulk of “Owls” consists of an “Owl Directory”—a page of description and vital statistics for each species sharing space with a large color photograph of the owl silhouetted onto the page. All guidebooks bow to utility; the absence of background facilitates identification but the birds, shorn of the trees, snow and sky that are so much a part of their patterning, look oddly denatured. But in size and tone, “Owls” aims as much for the celebratory as the encyclopedic; this is not the sort of field guide you bring into the field unless you also carry a coffee table.

The book is big enough, and fun-minded enough, to come wrapped in a life-size poster of a Great Gray Owl, a bird that stands more than two and a half feet tall. Much of its bulk is a fluffy illusion—they typically weigh less than three pounds. Still, a Great Gray Owl has been observed driving a bear from its nest. (Do not mess with nesting owls.)

Great Gray Owl

Both authors write eloquently about the most salient feature of owls: Like silent movie stars, they have “faces.” While most birds seem always in profile, owls have forward-facing eyes like our own. True, their eyeballs are fixed in bony sheaths, and they can turn their necks 270 degrees (which helps if you can’t move your eyes), but they look at you. The familiar eloquence of their faces derives from something called a “facial disc,” the smooth, feathered, slightly concave surface that makes barn owls look like Marcel Marceau and gives Great Gray Owls big hollow rings around their eyes, as if they’ve been reading all night.

As both books detail, the anthropomorphic effect of the facial disc is an accident of evolution that has sculpted owl faces into satellite dishes that direct sound waves to their ears. The ears, by the way, are not the fluffy “horns” some owls have on their heads but openings on the sides of the skull, hidden by feathers. Hidden too is the fact that one owl ear is higher than the other, which allows them to parse sounds and locations in subtle ways.

Part of the paradox of our relationship to owls is that the features that make them seem so human, and that we mistake for poetic expressiveness, are the very things that make them so good at killing. This is not the owls’ fault, though we have a habit of assigning our worst and best attributes to animals and punishing them accordingly.

One has only to look at the hovering photograph of a Barn Owl in “The Enigma of the Owl,” with its white wings to see why the birds, which like to hunt in cemeteries, were frequently mistaken for ghosts. And though a Barn Owl can easily kill a rodent a night, a great boon to a farmer, Mr. Unwin reports that, “as late as the 1950s, rural folk in the United Kingdom would nail a spread-eagled Barn Owl to a door in an effort to ward off thunder and lightning.” The Greeks matched Athena, goddess of wisdom, with the Little Owl, and the association stuck; the bird’s Latin name, Athena Noctua, means Athena of the Night. But a nearly identical subspecies found in the Middle East—Athena Noctua Lilith—was identified with a child-stealing demon.

We are better off leaving extremes of good and evil to the human realm, and letting owls be owls. According to Mr. Unwin, the Little Owl was brought to England in the 1700s, not because it resembled Athena or Lilith but because it was remarkably good at killing cockroaches. Now that is wisdom.

—Mr. Rosen is the author of “The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature,” among other books.