The House of Owls PDF
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The House of Owls Angell book.indb 1 1/25/15 10:37 AM Tony Angell Foreword by Robert Michael Pyle Yale university press/new haven & london Angell book.indb 2 1/25/15 10:37 AM the house of Owls Angell book.indb 3 1/25/15 10:37 AM Epigraph: From Owl Moon by Jane Yolen, copyright © 1987 by Jane Yolen. Reprinted by permission of Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, and by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Copyright © 2015 by Tony Angell. Foreword © 2015 by Robert Michael Pyle. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Designed by Mary Valencia. Set in Bulmer MT type by Jo Ellen Ackerman. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Angell, Tony The house of owls / Tony Angell ; foreword by Robert Michael Pyle. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-20344-8 (alk. paper) 1. Owls—North America. 2. Angell, Tony. I. Title. QL696.S8A538 2015 598.9'7097—dc23 2014035976 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Angell book.indb 4 1/25/15 10:37 AM When you go owling you don’t need words or warm or anything but hope. That’s what Pa says. The kind of hope that flies on silent wings under a shining Owl Moon. —Jane Yolen, Owl Moon Angell book.indb 5 1/25/15 10:37 AM This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword by Robert Michael Pyle ix Preface xv Acknowledgments xvii one The House of Owls 1 two About Owls 35 three Owls and Human Culture 71 four Owls in Company with People 85 five Owls of Unique Habitat 129 six Owls of Wild and Remote Places 167 Bibliography 187 Illustration Credits 193 Index 195 Angell book.indb 7 1/25/15 10:37 AM This page intentionally left blank Foreword By Robert Michael Pyle O wls. The very word has excited me since I was a lad. Unlike the author of the extraordinary book you hold in your hands, I never caught, raised, or lived with owls. I encountered Hooty the Owl in Thornton Burgess’s Bedtime Stories, loved The Owl and the Pussycat, and scoured the local public library’s shelves for books on owls, just as I did for otters, seashells, and butterflies. Later I read accounts of people who lived with owls, ending up many years later with Jona- than Maslow’s Owl Papers, Max Terman’s Messages from an Owl, and Bernd Hein- rich’s One Man’s Owl. And when I read the Harry Potter books, I thought by far the best thing in them was Harry’s owl Hedwig, and all the other mail-courier owls. It’s only too bad that as a kid conservationist, as I fancied myself, I was way too early for Carl Hiaasen’s Hoot. As much as I loved reading about owls as a boy, I was even more eager to encoun- ter them in flesh and feather. There wasn’t much chance in my postwar subdivision in Colorado. But it wasn’t long before I escaped the ordered grid and barren young yards, wandering off to the High Line Canal, an old irrigation ditch on the edge of the actual countryside. There, one enchanted day, I watched as a great horned owl burst from an old magpie nest in a cottonwood—and all of a sudden, owls had become real. Since that thrilling moment, I can remember the first sighting of every species of owl I’ve come to know in the wild: The first northern spotted owl, on its nest on a low big tree bough in Sequoia National Park. The first hawk owl, crowning a black spruce in the boundless taiga along the Alaska Highway. The first saw-whet, fishing the shoreline of a little lake near Olympia. The first great gray, early in the morning, in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon, even bigger than I’d dreamed. The ix Angell book.indb 9 1/25/15 10:37 AM
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