In the moments before seeing an owl comes a feeling like intuition. I will not forget one night when I stood on a balcony in suburban Sydney, and every wakeful creature in the surrounding bushland abruptly froze. Even the frogs seemed to want to renounce their noisy bodies. Who goes there? Seconds later, a powerful owl (the name of a species native to Australia) dropped onto the railing, and I, too, nearly leaped out of my skin. The owl was the size of a terrier, but languidly buoyant in the way of a day-old Mylar balloon, and to my ears silent. In the pin-drop quiet, it bounced along the balustrade. I never heard its talons touch the metal. The owl itself, I knew, had such sharp hearing that it could make out a possum’s heart pounding beneath its fur. Unseen, a second owl—mate to the first, I presumed—loosed a deep, woodwind hoot that carried.
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Owl calls often seem ghostlike or inchoate. A twofold sorcery: Owls can lead us to doubt our own faculties while drawing us to wonder at the mysteries of theirs. Of some 260 owl species at large in the night, at dusk, and less commonly during daylight, many are stealthily camouflaged and decked out with decibel-dampening feathers, their shrieks floating without clear origin. The young of some of those species have long been practicing. Great horned owls find their voice while they are still doubled over in the dark of their moon-shaped egg. Having punctured the small air cell inside the egg’s membrane with their budding beak, the proto-owlets inflate their lungs and start chittering. To each its private void, in a confinement growing tighter the bigger they get. If a spectral sound is supposed to come from beyond the grave, what word might characterize the babble of embryonic life, the noises of beings too tenuous to out themselves from their shell?
Owls’ otherworldly aura—their keening more an atmosphere than an animal sound—has engendered human superstition: What better shorthand for sinister happenings than their ethereal calls? And yet owls have inspired an altogether different response as well. In antiquity, they were sometimes identified as “human-headed birds.” Their domed head, wide-set eye sockets (enabling binocular vision), and flat facial profile—distinctive within their biological class—are features that map onto a human visage. Whether the mythic depiction of owls as thoughtful, even philosophical, beings stemmed from this semblance alone, who can say?
Perhaps the inference arose instead from an understanding of owls as active at the close of the customary workday, after nightfall, hours that offer the chance for repose and contemplation. Or perhaps owls’ sensitivity to stimuli beyond human ken suggested unfathomed know-how, a shrewd intelligence needed to navigate the dark. Either way, the sagacity of owls has long stood as a categorical anomaly in a world in which to be called “birdbrained” remains an insult.
Whether feared or revered, owls have lately invited scrutiny by science writers and ornithologists eager to explain the birds’ acute perceptiveness, their far-flung environments (Antarctica is the only continent where you won’t find owls), and the relationships between the two. In her 2016 best seller, The Hidden Lives of Owls: The Science and Spirit of Nature’s Most Elusive Birds, Leigh Calvez focuses on the owls of the Pacific Northwest, sharing her suspenseful nighttime explorations of the biology and behavior of birds ranging in size from the saw-whet owl, which can fit in a teacup, to the imposing great grey owl (known to some as the “Phantom of the North”). The conservationist Jonathan C. Slaght has devoted decades to learning about Blakiston’s fish owl, “a fire hydrant with a six-foot wingspan,” as he puts it. In Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl (2020), Slaght yokes science to macho adventure in order to track the “floppy goblin” with electric-yellow eyes into the ice-strewn Primorye region of eastern Russia—a shrinking habitat, as are the owl’s hunting grounds in the waters and riverbanks of some of the coldest tributaries in Japan.
Two new entries in the owl quest find closer kinship between bird and human, yet remain wary of domesticating the dark’s inhabitants too much. In The Wise Hours: A Journey Into the Wild and Secret World of Owls, the poet and nature writer Miriam Darlington warns against the urge to “cutify” the birds, noting how readily owls’ big, forward-facing eyes convey babyish appeal, not just profundity. She has in mind the owl of meme culture, featured in viral YouTube, Tumblr, and TikTok posts; remixed as fan art on Reddit forums; and available as an avatar option in multiplayer video games. Online, owls star as twee, humanoid knockoffs, and could hardly be further from their cryptic counterparts heard caterwauling in the starlit woods. A tour of the platforms reveals owls peevishly rain-drenched, owls clowning around, powder-puff nestlings pleading for a dangled snack, owls wincing and head-bobbing, owls as the rambunctious companions of domestic pets. The antithesis of otherworldly, these and similarly whimsical, infantilized animal portrayals are, in Darlington’s view, an invitation to rob nature of its vital wildness.
Yet her project to preserve owl awe doesn’t stop her from recruiting the birds to therapeutic ends. Darlington’s adult son falls ill, and the narrative of his diagnosis and treatment (a “perma-drone of worries”) fastens itself to her journey into the insomniac sphere of owls in a season of family crisis. Midway between divesting owls of adorability and asserting their status as a marvel of nature, Darlington finds they have a role to play as her own personal gargoyles: They serve as forbidding beings that externalize the author’s anxieties, helping her to either wing those fears away or confront them.
Jennifer Ackerman, internationally beloved by birders as the author of two popular books about avian intelligence—The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think and The Genius of Birds—supplies a more hardheaded assessment of owls, as well as of owl worship, in What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds. She locates her owls in the vacant lots of suburban Maringá, in southern Brazil; aloft in hawthorn and chokecherry forests in western Montana; in rehab for roadside injuries in Minnesota; in a limestone quarry in Maastricht, a municipality of the Netherlands. Her investigations lead her to question: How smart are owls, really, and why have they come to stand for the supernatural solemnity of a world beyond us?
As Ackerman has previously relayed, startling findings have emerged from the study of ornithological cognition over the past two decades. Researchers have discovered that, despite the lack of a layered cerebral cortex, the brains of several avian lineages permit complex feats of memory, logic, recognition, even math. Populations of corvids (crows, rooks, ravens, kindred others) are today famed for tool use, problem-solving, and seemingly ritual responses to their dead. American crows will congregate in cawing mobs around the lifeless bodies of birds of their same species, and later avoid food found in the area. Pinyon jays can remember each of a thousand spots where they once stashed a seed. European magpies pass the mirror test: They can recognize themselves as individuals. Some parrots’ language facility far exceeds mimicry. When trained in a lab, pigeons—surely the birds most impugned as automatons—turn out to be on par with primates in their counting ability (able to order arrays of objects, from a single object, to a pair, to a trio).
Ackerman wants to know what the latest science says about how owl species stack up against the cleverest birds. In relation to their body size, owls have large brains, an anatomical characteristic thought to have evolved in tandem with “parental provisioning” of offspring. Indeed, owl nestlings hatch before they can hunt or scavenge, dependent on food supplied by adults to provide the energy their brain tissue needs to grow. Yet for the most part, the brainpower of owls is enchained to the activity of their senses, rather than to the sort of intelligence found in birds that display inventiveness, selfhood, superior powers of recall, or numeracy. Some 75 percent of an owl’s cortexlike forebrain is dedicated to hearing and vision, faculties so astounding in range and exactitude that they might seem, to us, a variety of natural magic.
Owl species deemed “eared” or “horned” don’t actually have external ear pinna the way we do, or bony horns like antelope. The flareable tufts of feathers, called “plumicorns,” they sport atop their head might be used to gesture to other owls, or perhaps to help conceal an owl by breaking up its rounded outline, making it appear more like the stump of a rough or broken branch. Though their true ears are mere apertures hidden under their feathers, owls’ reactivity to sound has few equivalents in the animal kingdom. The great grey owl can not only pick up the swish of a vole’s footfall coming from a passage cored into a snowbank, but also figure out the elevation of the sound source, so as to strike through the snow and hit that very point. In some owl species, a portion of the hearing nerve branches into the optical lobe of the brain, which scientists speculate could mean that these owls form a visual signal of something heard but out of sight.
Owls see well in the dimmest conditions, and some species have retained photoreceptor rods that also make them sensitive to ultraviolet light—they are able to see colors that we cannot. Eurasian eagle owls exploit this part of their visual spectrum by having patches of neck plumage that are brightened by reflecting UV light, markings germane to displays of rivalry. Their young also have UV-reflective blotches inside their throat, prominent cues when the eagle owlets gape for food.
For Ackerman, the deftness of owls’ senses might be regarded as “its own breed of genius”—a supremely adaptive gift—though she recognizes that scientists rarely conceive of animal intelligence this way, finding evidence instead in exceptional behavior that conveys some kind of mental nimbleness or surplus. And owls do engage in some types of activity coded as “smart”: Ackerman reports on this repertoire too. Owls are curious about novelty in their environment—one reason they are prone to getting trapped in pipes, hay blowers, and ventilation shafts, which they gamely explore. Little owls can tell groups of people apart, tolerating farmers but fleeing at a glimpse of ornithologists, who catch and band them.
Though owl faces may seem static, some species flex and refashion the feathered discs around their eyes to reflect states of alertness or relaxation. Owls, especially juvenile ones, play. They also learn: Great horned owls spend about six months with their parents developing dexterities that will aid their survival, including how to fly through tightly set tree canopies, and how to pounce and kill. Compared with adults, young barn owls experience long spells of REM sleep, the part of the sleep cycle associated with vivid and emotion-laden dreams in humans. If barn owlets dream, researchers suspect that those dreams help cement skills they acquire in the twilight, just as, when mice fall into REM sleep, the rodents enter a period of mental processing associated with learning to take cover from birds of prey (among them, owls).
Indeed, if we get beyond the emblematic wisdom of owls, we might come to recognize their most anthropomorphic quality—their versatility. Owls have unintentionally migrated as stowaways on ships and flourished in new territory. Corridors of agricultural land have facilitated their dispersal too. A few species have acclimatized remarkably well to our architecture and infrastructure, thriving in stables and belfries, occupying dugouts by causeways, roosting by the hundreds in city squares or in cemeteries (where grave sites, laid with edible votives, attract rodents).
Male burrowing owls have been documented festooning their earthen tunnels with decorative bits of potato, nubs of concrete, corncobs, old gloves, and stolen fabric (red, white, blue, green, in order of preference)—small treasuries underground. Camera traps have also revealed owl food sources to be more diverse than was once thought. They don’t just eat mice, fish, amphibians, and insects, but will also scavenge for carrion, picking meat from dead dolphins and decomposing crocodiles on the shoreline, and stripping quills from the carcasses of crested porcupines to get at the flesh. The largest owl species will hunt other birds (including owls), and go after skunks, fawns, even cats.
Ultimately, Ackerman concludes that owls do not warrant their storied eminence as recondite knowledge keepers. Nor are they crow-witted by the standards of modern science. Owls are opportunists. When Flaco, an eagle owl, first escaped from the Central Park Zoo in New York, his flight muscles were not yet strong enough to support flying farther than four blocks, and he bumbled his landings. For a decade he’d lived off hand-cut meat and slaughtered mice.
Today Flaco hunts his own vermin, and ranges artfully in the north end of Central Park. Bird-watchers praise the preservation of the wildness within him, despite his long captivity. What proves most bewitching about Flaco, described in his zoo days as “pudgy” and “grumpy,” is how swiftly he has freed himself not only from his enclosure but from performative charm. Owls might yet be our alter egos in more than their ability to prosper in a diversity of habitats. What animal more readily accommodates our deep need to swivel between symbolisms, now hooting their summons to our dark and powerful instincts, now strutting and fluffing their appeal to our sense of whimsy? The duality of owls: as Janus-faced as we are.
This article appears in the September 2023 print edition with the headline “Owls Aren’t That Smart.”
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