The girl who married an owl

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, natural history, biographies

If ever an owl deserved a biography, Wesley does. He was author Stacey O'Brien's charge, companion and confidant for nineteen years. In Wesley the Owl Ms O'Brien brings us his, and her, life with a remarkable richness of detail and delicacy of feeling. Having agreed to adopt the handicapped owlet when he was about four days old, she was told, "To that which you tame, you owe your life." While caring for the little bird brought Stacey to life, in the end she did indeed owe her life, her recovery from a debilitating brain tumor, to Wesley.

North American Barn Owls and a cluster of related species worldwide are in a genus distinct from all other owls. They have a distinctive evolution that converges upon similar hunting methods and nocturnal habits, but differ otherwise. They don't hoot, they scream; they also warble, murmur, chirp, and carry on quite a conversation with themselves or whoever is nearby whenever they are not silently hunting. Owls in general live in rich soundscape. Whereas humans (and all primates) devote about half the brain to visual processing, and a much smaller amount to sound, the opposite is true of owls.

Barn owls in particular have faces that funnel a large cone of sound to their ears. They can hear a mouse's heartbeat under inches of snow, and his footfalls even deeper. We must sound to them like chuffing locomotives. You can't hide from a barn owl. One of Stacey's friends tried. He and Stacey conspired to hide him under the blankets on her bed, peeping out through a small hole. Then she would bring the owl into "their" room and leave. Wesley went right for the little hole and spent the entire time threatening the man, who froze, terrified, until she returned. He was a large man; his heartbeat and breathing probably notified Wesley of his presence from three rooms away.

A barn owl eats three or four mice daily, swallowing them whole. An "owl pellet" is a "used mouse", consisting of skeleton and hair and not much else. When molting, the daily intake goes up to seven. Growing baby owls need six daily. Imagine the hunting labor required of Daddy owl when he and Mommy have five little ones! In Wesley's life, Stacey calculates that she prepared 28,000 mice for him. Barn owls cannot live healthily on anything but mice.

A couple of times in the book, the author mentions that Wesley helped her bear the "alone times". She relates her relationships with three men, and how each ended in disappointment. She learned early, "love me, love my owl", and no man could make the grade.

She was a research aide at Caltech when Wesley became her charge. After leaving Caltech, she remained in contact with her former supervisor. He hoped she would tape record some new owl vocalizations. Once Wesley reached the mature age of about four, this paid off big time. Wesley fell in love with Stacey, and did his best to make her his mate. She managed to record his courting and mating calls, and wrote down his behaviors. When the people at Caltech heard the tape, her mentor said, "I've never heard anything like that!!" Nobody had married an owl before. It was all new.

We are blessed, and cursed, with long lives. I think it safe to say that, for animals with body temperatures approaching 40°C, DNA's replication fidelity allows a lifetime of no more than 120-150 years (cooler animals, like some tortoises, may persist for 200 years). We outlive our animal companions; that is the curse. At the age of 18, Wesley was getting frail the way a 110-year-old human does. He barely lived past his 19th birthday (and I'll leave it to the author to pull back the curtain on the closing scenes).

Stacey's life nearly ended about the same time. It seems the emotional and practical work of writing Wesley's biography helped her beat the tumor that, for a time, debilitated her. What a superb story.