I appreciated this book for its straightforward dispensing of information. Most of the animal books I read are more narrative-based and usually end in tragedy: spoiler alert, we’re destroying everything we profess to love. Not to say we’re not doing the same to owls, but they are thriving in certain areas, so it’s possible to read about them without a constant sense of impending doom.

The organizing principle here is that new technology leads to new discoveries—shout out to nest cams! There are chapters on eco-location, on hooting, on courting and mating, on locating owls, on roosting and migrating and protecting. Our ability to better track and observe owls has led to all kinds of interesting information, for instance, I learned that Powerful Owls will eat up to three hundred opossums a year, which struck me as kind of stomach-turning but who knows, maybe they’re good eating. The book also features a beautiful color centerfold with pictures of all kinds of owls, including the Flammulated Owl, and yes, I mostly just wanted to use the word flammulated, but it’s also an especially beautiful picture.

Human ambition and ingenuity are on display here—the scientists and even ordinary people who devote much of their lives to studying these elusive birds come off like heroes. I learned that in Australia there is something called a Difficult Bird Research Group, a “small band of researchers who study Australia’s most endangered species” and who devote part of their time trying to locate Tasmanian Masked Owls, who are “very rare and deeply secretive.” I learned that Pablo Picasso kept an injured Little Owl so as to rehabilitate it, and kept on keeping it after it healed, addicted to their not surprisingly “tumultuous relationship”—they were both “grumpy” and constantly griping at each other, which in part resulted in the owl’s depiction in much of Picasso’s work at the time.

The whole of the book amounts to more that these interesting piles of facts. By the end, the reader will almost inevitably have a new appreciation for owls, and why humans are so fascinated by them. Perhaps most importantly, the book ends with a consideration of not only what we are doing to harm owls, but a list of suggestions regarding what we might do to help.