Joseph Drew Lanham (left) interviews fellow ecologist Carl Safina during a recent Harvard talk about Safina’s book “Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe.” Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer

We have linked to the work of Carl Safina only twice before (the second time just a photo credit) but now realize what we have been missing. Our thanks to Alvin Powell,
Harvard Gazette staff writer:

Screech owl wisdom

It took an ailing screech owl to teach a scientist the value of up-close-and-personal study.

In a talk Monday at the Science Center, Carl Safina, an ecologist at Stony Brook University and author of several books about humanity’s relationship with nature, recalled that the chick was found on a friend’s lawn as the pandemic was tightening its grip on the world. In the picture Safina received, the bird looked beyond saving.“How did it die?” he asked.

“It was just a downy little, dying thing,” Safina, whose most recent book is “Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe,” said in his Harvard talk, which was sponsored by the FAS Division of Science, Harvard Library, and the Harvard Book Store and included questions from Clemson University ecologist Joseph Drew Lanham.

Safina and his wife, Patricia, took in the little bird of prey. They planned to nurse it back to health and then perform a “soft release,” in which the animal is set loose but stays nearby, supported with food while it learns the ropes of wild bird life.

But the owlet’s flight feathers didn’t grow in properly, leaving it grounded for months after it should have fledged. Safina delayed the release further to ensure the bird would properly molt — critical to renew feathers that keep birds warm and enable flight. Over those extended months, Safina got to know Alfie in ways that moved and changed him and his wife.

“An owl found me and then I was watching ‘an’ owl,” he said. “It was no longer an owl after a while, it was ‘she,’ because she had a history with us. … This little owl, who was with us much longer than we thought she would be, became an individual to us by that history and all those interactions.”…

Read the whole article here.