WHAT AN OWL KNOWS: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds

New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Ackerman’s new book is WHAT AN OWL KNOWS: The New Science of the World's Most Enigmatic Birds, a scientific investigation into owls and why they exert such a hold on human imagination. Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about science and nature for more than three decades. Her previous books include, The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think and The Genius of Birds.

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina delRio, a weekly conversation about fitness,
health and happenings in our community onone oh six point seven Light FM.
Good morning, and thanks for joiningus on Get Connected. For millennia,
owls have captivated and intrigued humans withtheir piercing gaze and quiet flight. Owls
are often a symbol of wisdom andknowledge and staying up late. But what

(00:26):
does an owl really know? Howdo they live? And what do we
know about them? Our guest isNew York Times best selling author Jennifer Ackerman.
Her new book is What an OwlKnows The Signs of the World's most
Enigmatic Birds, a scientific investigation intoowls and why they exert such a hold
on human imagination. Jennifer Ackerman,thank you for being on the show.
Oh, it's a pleasure. Thankyou for having me here. Night.

(00:48):
Owls wise, old owls. Owlshad been showing up in human stories and
culture and artifacts for so long.Can you talk about the cultural myths that
surround them and how far back dothey go? Oh, go way back.
So humans have really been obsessed withowls, I think for for tens
of thousands of years. You know, the the Some of the earliest cave
paintings from thirty six thousand years agoshow an owl um and as far as

(01:14):
we know, that's the first representationof bird in a cave, any bird
in cave art. And they haveshown up in all kinds of artifacts and
and as symbols in for cultures andacross really around the world since then and
right up to today. You know, I think about the just the omnipresence

(01:34):
of owls in our in our storiesand our myths, and as I said,
in our symbols, in our symbols, they appear more than any other
bird in m in the stories andmyths of humans, and attitudes really range
tremendously from sort of considering owls,you know, these symbols of wisdom,
of beneficence, of good luck,all the way to cultures that really consider

(02:00):
them kind of witches, emblems ofevil or omens of bad luck. Some
of this might stem from the factthat we just haven't known that much about
them. Over time, people areprojecting some ideas onto them, and until
recently it's been very hard to studythem. Technology has kind of changed the
game, that's absolutely right. It'syou know, we've We've had long term

(02:22):
studies going on for a long timeand those are generating some very interesting research.
But we also have new tools nowthat I call them eyes in the
field. New eyes like infrared camerasto see what's going on with owls at
night. Also nest camps that areoffering this kind of twenty four seven view
of all the intimate interactions in anowl family going on at the nest.

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There are also drones actually that arebeing used to explore owls and remote habitats.
You know, some of these owlslive in very remote areas in Siberia,
and you know the only way toto document their presence is with these
drones, and also satellite imagery andspeaking of satellites, where we now can

(03:07):
actually attach satellite transmitters to some ofthe bigger owls and it's allowing us to
understand their movements over both short andlong distances. So all this new understanding
gleaned from these technologies, along withthose insight from researchers who have just been
doing work in the field for many, many decades, is creating this really

(03:29):
explosion of a wonderful new knowledge.One of the things you make clear in
the book, And I want tomake sort of clear here when we say
owls, this is sort of owlwith small. Oh. There are two
hundred and sixty species of owls,and you talk about so many in the
book. The one thing they havein common, perhaps I could be wrong,
is they have that that disc shapedface and those big eyes. That

(03:50):
shaped face also helps them here andhunt. It has an actual, it
has a reason for being. Yes, So not all owls have that facial
disc. What they all have incommon is the forward facing eyes, as
you say, which gives them binocularvision, and that's a very important tool
when you're trying to track and zeroin on moving prey. And they have

(04:11):
these round heads. But just thatnot all species of owls depend on hearing
to hunt. There's some owls suchas the Blackiston's fish owl, the biggest
owl on the planet. It's thesize of a fire hydrant, but it
hunts primarily by fishing, and soit doesn't use hearing as much as it
uses vision for hunting. But theowls that do use hearing, such as

(04:32):
barn owls and great gray owls,they have this wonderful facial disc that acts
like a kind of a feathered satellitedish to collect sound and channel it toward
their ears. And you know,most people think of animals ears as the
little things that stick up from itshead. In owls, those little tufts
are actually not related to hearing itat all. They're used for camouflage.

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The actual ears of an owl arejust holes in its head. And it's
what's inside those ears that's really soamazing. You know, Owls have auditory
systems, hearing systems that are consideredwhen the race cars, the ferraris of
sound sensitivity in the animal world.They're just remarkable. There's so much in
the book about this. Let's moveon. I want to talk about the

(05:17):
pellets in just a moment, butlet me remind everybody who we're speaking with.
Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about signsin nature for more than three decades.
Her previous books include The Bird Way, a new look at how birds
talk, work, play, parentand think, and The Genius of Birds.
You're listening to get connected on oneoh six point seven light FM.
I'm na del rio. Jennifer Ackerman'snew book is What an Owl Knows,

(05:41):
The new signs of the world's mostenigmatic birds, the pellets, what kind
of happens between meals Jennifer, Yeah, this amazed me. So owls,
you know, they eat all kindsof creatures. They eat other birds,
they eat lots of little mammals frombowls and mice all the way up to
squirrels, rabbits, even small rowdeer and young sheep. They can do

(06:03):
very big animals and the indigestible partsof their prey. So that's the you
know, the fur, the claws, sometimes the feathers. These are compressed
into what's called a pellet in theowl's stomach and it stays there for several
hours, and then the owl actuallyejects it by moving it up it's esophagus

(06:27):
and out of its mouth. Andit's quite an amazing sight because these pellets
can be very large. They're likebig, fat stuffed cigars, and they're
packed with lil know, bones andfur and claws, and it's they're actually
a great way of determining what anowl is feeding on because and in some
schools they do these projects of dissectingpellets really to figure out what's what's in

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an owl's diet. So it's reallya remarkable I think of a remarkable aspect
of their digestion and their lifestyle.You talk in the book about it how
some people would use dogs to findowls by tracking the pellets on the ground,
And I wonder, how do youknow, How could you tell,
especially in the Tristate area, ifyou have an owl in your neighborhood or

(07:11):
an owl nearby. I mean,you might find pellets on the ground,
you might find feathers. But thoughgenerally the way that most people determine whether
there's an owl present or not isthrough its vocalizations. It's hooting. You
know, we oftentimes hear an owlbefore we see it, or we don't
see it at all, do wejust hear it. The other way that

(07:32):
people can find owls sometimes is thatthey're they're often mobbed by smaller birds.
They're mobbed by crows. They're mobbedby little birds like nut hatches and chicken
ease, these little birds and thebigger crows they get very upset when an
owl is around because it's such afine hunter and they know it's at risks,
so they vocalize and they mobbed theowls. And sometimes you can determine

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the presence of an owl by theactivity of birds around in this area,
in the city or the suburbs,what kind of human activity would attract or
repel them. So some people,you know, they put up nest boxes,
and owls are often attracted to roostin these boxes are sometimes nest I
live in a city and I putout an owl box on my maple tree

(08:18):
behind my kitchen, and an easternscreech owl roosted there for a spring.
Quite an amazing thing to see itso close and had a little round head
peeking out the hole in the daytime, and then it would disappear at night,
and in the morning we'd see thesevestiges of its meal just hanging out,
sometimes hanging outside the box, likethe wing of a blue jay or

(08:39):
a one time it was the wholebody of a morning dove. Oh gosh.
One of the things, speaking ofEastern screech owls you mentioned there's so
many idiosyncratic things ol to owl species, is that particular one. They have
the snakes, the live snakes theybring into the nest. Yes, they're
blind snakes, which are a strangekind of reptile themselves. They actually keep

(09:01):
the net help to keep the nestsclean and free of parasites. It's it's
kind of a remarkable symbiotic relationship.Owls may be great at cording, but
back to the nest, they're notso great at making nests. They do
prefer to borrow someone else's home oras you you know, supply them their
own a nest box. Yes,that's absolutely right. They do not build
their own nests. They commandeer thenests and the other structures that other animals

(09:26):
have built. And for instance,northern pygmy owls, some little owls they
nest in the holes and aspen treesand other trees that woodpeckers have excavated.
A species like the long eared owlthat nests in crow and magpie nests,
and big birds like great gray owlsand great horned owls they nest in the
larger nests of ravens and sometimes hawks. And then there's a little owl called

(09:52):
the burrowing owl that actually nests undergroundin the burrows that are tugged by prairie
dogs and groundhogs and all kinds ofcreatures. But that one's particularly extraordinary.
I think the owls mate in ourMost owls mate in bonded pairs. And
what's one of the more extreme courtshiprituals. Well, the courtship rituals are

(10:13):
I found just really incredible. There'san owl called the short eared owl that
has ritual that's called a sky dance. And these birds go way up in
the air a mail does like ahawk. But then they drop suddenly and
they clap their wings beneath them.It's really an extraordinary sight. And they
do it at sunset. It's beautifulto watch, and the females down on

(10:37):
the ground and you know she's sortof determining whether or not this male is
putting on a good performance and whethershe wants to mate with him. And
another example is the northern sawet owl, which quarts vocally and rather an extraordinary
way it toots, so the littleowls too, the bigger owls hoot,
and this little owl toots at onehundred and sixty times per minute in order

(10:58):
to draw female. Since you've mentionedvoices a couple of times, in fact,
each owl has its own signature,do they not Yes? And that
is really something that we've only discoveredfairly recently, and a lot of new
technology is helping us, but alsojust incredibly observant and skilled listeners who are

(11:18):
have been able to tease apart thedifferences between individual owls, and it turns
out that an owl's hoot is likealmost like a fingerprints. It's a unique
signature. And once we determined thatit was possible then to actually monitor the
populations of owls more accurately, youcould tell one individual from another. And

(11:39):
also it gave us this window intotheir social lives. You know you mentioned
do pair's stay together? Well,in studying the vocalizations of owls, we've
learned that some species, like greathorned owls your Asian eagle owls, are
not nearly as monogamous as we thoughtthey were. They don't necessarily mate for
life. In fact, a lotof mate switching that goes on. Since

(12:01):
we're in New York, I wantto talk about a couple of local owls
for a moment. So you mentionedin the book the Unfortunate End of Barry,
the barred owl who lived in CentralPark until she ran into a maintenance
truck in twenty twenty one, andI imagine you followed the story of Flacco,
that was the Eurasian eagle owl whoescaped from Central Park into the zoo
a few months ago. We haven'theard anything in a few months. Any

(12:22):
thoughts on how that will turn out. You know, there's a lot of
controversy about that. It's hard toembrace the captivity of these birds. So
there's something, you know, sortof wonderful about black Oh finally getting his
liberation. But it's a hard worldout there, and you know, he
was definitely feeding himself well for awhile. The problem is, and this

(12:46):
is something that I think affected Barrythe bard owl, that a lot of
their prey rodents of all kinds arepoisoned, you know, and they carry
poisons in their systems, and owlsfeed on the poison rodents and they accumulate
the poisons in their own tissues,and that can be lethal for them.
We hope that's a happy ending thatstory. Hopefully won't hear any If we

(13:09):
don't hear anything about it, Ithink it's a good thing. Actually,
yeah, very possibly. That owlcertainly seemed highly capable and would I would
not be against him. There's somuch more about owls of all kinds in
Jennifer Ackerman's book What an Owl Knows, The New Signs of the World's most
Enigmatic Birds. Thank you for beingon Get Connected. Thank you so much,

(13:30):
great questions, You're so efficient,Really appreciate it. This has been
get connected with Nina del Rio onone oh six point seven Lightfm. The
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(13:50):
Thanks for listening.