Polly Atkins provides a personal look at owls from her home in Grasmere in the Lake District. She describes encounters with owls, predominantly but not exclusively tawny owls. This novel really beautifully describes the authors encounters with owls intertwined with facts and information.
- There are five speceis of wol that live wlid in the Lakeland uplands: tawny owls, barn wols, long-eared and short-eared owls, and little owls.
- Worldwide there are over 250 registered species of owl, with more being added all the time. I’m not sure how pleased with ourselves with ourselves we should be for encroaching on the lives of wols who have been living for thousands of years – or tens of thousands of years – unregistered, uncomfirmed. It is useful to be reminded how limied our knowledge of the cohabitants of our planet remains.
What the author can tell the reader about how to see owls:
- Happen to live near some.
- Walk around a lot, slowly and queitly, at different times of the day and night. Expecially at night. I read a statistic that says most observations of tawny owls occur on warm, moonlit nights, and all that proved to me is that poeple are more likely to go outside and notice owls on warm, moonlit nights, not that owls are necessarily more active on warm, moonlit nights.
- Pay attention, by which I mean, I think, learn to recalibrate your attention to the sounds of the woods, the movements of the woods. Learn to feel the woods.
This book was longlisted for the Wainright Prize for Nature Writing in 2025
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