I always sat there waiting for the moment that it left the box to go hunting. It would just roost during the day with this little head in this circle of the box. And I'll be darned if an Eastern screech owl didn't take to that box and roost. I put it right there next to the kitchen window. We have a kitchen window that looks right out on this maple tree. JA: Many years ago, I put up an owl roosting box on the maple tree behind my house. SHK: When did your own personal interest in owls start? And this little owl is kind of a witness to those human acts of misbehavior. And he used it in very interesting ways in some of his etchings and prints that the owl is in a corner, often looking out at some scene of debauchery or humans really misbehaving. But the bigger point is that they're wild creatures and they really need to be in a wild environment.īut I think Picasso saw in this little owl his own visage. JA: No, they're terrible pets, for lots of reasons. SHK: And that’s some of the irony, right? They seem so sweet and wise, but they’re not really great house pets, after all. Picasso found this little injured owl, called a little owl, a European species, and he kept it and took it with him back to Paris and then used this owl as a kind of muse, although it was a very cranky owl. JA: They’re a powerful symbolic presence. SHK: And we know owls have captivated artists - from the prehistoric Chauvet Cave paintings in France, to Picasso, who was known for painting and sculpting little owls. And other cultures view them as emblems of evil, of bad omens and death. It has an owl image on one side and Athena on the other. And the ancient Greek coin is called the owl. Athena was the goddess of wisdom and she had an owl with her. Some cultures consider them symbols of good luck and prosperity, like the Greeks. Crows are very common in myths and symbols, and sometimes jays, but owls top them all. They hold symbolic value for people all over the world. JA: I spoke with one ethno-ornithologist who studies the relationship between birds and people, and she surveyed how all different kinds of birds show up as symbols in the beliefs and stories of hundreds of different cultures. What are some of the enduring myths and legends of owls? Owls are known as messengers, and carry symbolic meaning. SHK: Our interest in owls spans wide time periods and geographies, continents and generations. So I think it's this combination of things, the familiar and the strange that makes these birds really so powerful. But owls break the rules, and I think we kind of put them in a supernatural category for that reason. Living things aren't supposed to appear and disappear this way. It's spooky how they appear out of the dark without advance notice. They really reveal themselves only with their kind of weird hoots and cries. So they look like us.Īnd at the same time, we see this suggestion of a whole other way of being. Most birds don't have forward-facing eyes the way that owls do. There's something very familiar about them. Jennifer Ackerman: They're utterly unlike other birds. But there’s something especially obsessive and fascinating about owls. Shannon Henry Kleiber: Jennifer, there are so many people interested in birds, and you have written about all kinds of birds. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length Speaking with "To the Best Of Our Knowledge," she said that’s part of the attraction. Jennifer Ackerman writes in her new book "What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds" about how owls are cryptic, hard to find and difficult to understand. Why have people throughout time felt connected with owls, above all birds? Is it their sense of all-knowing wisdom? Or maybe that they are the only birds with two front-facing eyes.
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