Alfie The Screech Owl—The Star Personality of My Book Alfie And Me
Starred pre-publication review in Library Journal!
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Starred pre-publication review in Kirkus Reviews!
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Pre-order your copy of Owls in Our Yard! The Story of Alfie,
a new children’s book featuring Alfie by Carl Safina:
https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324053194/
The Overview.
When she was a nestling, Alfie the screech owl—the star personality of my book Alfie and Me—had a near-death experience.
In June of 2018 I got a text message with a photo of a very bedraggled looking baby bird. Someone had found the bird on their lawn. The text was from a wildlife rehabilitator. This bird was in such bad shape, it looked more like a wet washcloth than a bird. The rehabber wasn’t sure what kind of bird this was. I said it looked to me like an owl.
The rehabilitator expertly stabilized the foundling, then reached out again because of my long experience with wildlife rehab and handling and caring for hawks and owls. We corresponded frequently and visited repeatedly.
When the owl—an Eastern Screech Owl—was near the age of release, the rehabilitator was scheduled to go overseas. So, we took on the release project. This release would not be about simply going somewhere wooded, opening a cage, and driving away. That kind of release seems more like abandonment. In fact, there would be no cage. It would be a “soft release,” whereby the owlet would be free to come and go while gaining strength and flying skills, until they themself chose when to wander off into the wild for good. In the wild, young owls take weeks to get to independence. In the meantime, their parents feed them. We planned to replicate that. My first soft release of birds was back in college when I was working on a project to reintroduce peregrine falcons. Since then, I’d been involved in several other releases all built on the same idea: back up the baby while they gain survival skills and choose their own independence, as they would in nature if they were being raised by their parents. Meanwhile, we named the owlet: Alfie.
But an unanticipated problem occurred, probably caused by her having nearly starved before she was found. Flight feathers emerged only from the last part of each wing, the part corresponding to our hand. Two-thirds of the wing remained bare. She could not fly. This caused us to care for her longer than planned. The belated feathers eventually grew in, and we waited to make sure they did molt properly—which they did—from her gray juvenile pajamas into gorgeous brick-red adult plumage.
By the time Alfie wandered off, we’d gotten to know each other very well.
My wife Patricia and I would surely miss her. Of course, I worried, but it was out of my hands. Most young owls, fledged naturally by their own parents, don’t survive their first year. Alfie had vanished. I could only hope she’d survive.
Alfie as she appeared when rescued
Alfie's first summer
Alfie's adult plumage
A Wing in Our World and a Foot in Hers
But then something remarkable happened. A week after her disappearance Alfie returned one night. To our surprise and delight, she centered her territory around our yard and its adjacent woodland. She attracted a wild mate. They chose to nest in a box I put up in the yard. And Alfie raised a brood of youngsters who all survived and fledged. Alfie has never again left for more than a couple of weeks.
So, not only was that dying little orphan saved, but she has lived to rejoin the world, to add to the future, and to expand our understanding of life. It’s been thrilling. It’s been—magical.
Our experience with Alfie blurred the usual boundaries between humans and the rest of the living world. Alfie had a wing in our world and that meant we had a foot in hers. Because she re-wilded yet remained unafraid of us, I was able to follow her at close range, or sit right near the nest (it was the best place imaginable to take notes) and come to see and understand intimate details of her life as a natural, relational being—details that in broad strokes demonstrated daily that we are all one living family.
Alfie and Plus-One
Plus-One feeds Alfie a moth at the nest
Plus-One feeds Alfie
Alfie alights on Carl's camera lens
Learning to Live Relationally From Alfie
Alfie & Me is a book about what’s possible when we blur the boundaries between humans and the rest of the world. One take-home is that when we shift the focus off ourselves we become more human. Another is that in our culture we think and act transactionally but what’s needed is to live relationally.
Thinking about what this meant prompted me to explore the question of how other peoples in other cultures around the world, and through time, have seen the human place in the world and the cosmos. And why our culture’s relationship with the world is so troubled. That exploration is braided into the story, and that is the book Alfie and Me.
Alfie has had her share of ups and downs, but she became a free-living wild owl who is a faithful mate and competent mother. Her first mate, who we named Plus-One, was a super hunter who fathered six owlets. We saw him a lot; he wasn’t very shy about us. He lasted two years from late 2019 to after the 2021 nesting season. Alfie was without a mate the next year. She laid eggs—all infertile—and incubated them long past their normal due date. It felt to me that she was keeping the faith in a world that had broken its promise. And then in 2023 a new male, Jack, arrived and fathered her recent brood of four. Jack is much more elusive, seldom-seen by us, and much more aggressively protective near the nest.
As of this writing (summer, 2023) Alfie is five years old and has just fledged her tenth young one into the wild. She might live another decade, but she’s already been miraculous.
Alfie up in her nest box with Carl below
Alfie's 2020 clutch of eggs, May 2nd
The just-hatched 2020 brood
Alfie's chicks, June 11th
Alfie with her owlet
Ready, set...
The hoo say hi