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One Man's Owl
Bernd Heinrich
Bernd Heinrich's *One Man's Owl* is the diary of an unlikely companionship: a biologist and the great horned owl, named Bubo, that he raised from a storm-orphaned nestling. Across three years around his cabin in the Maine woods, Heinrich watches Bubo grow from a helpless ball of down into a formidable nocturnal predator, recording everything - how the owl learns to recognize prey, how other birds mob him, how a wild creature can be intimate without ever being tame. Heinrich, long a professor of biology and one of America's finest naturalist-writers, refuses to sentimentalize; the science is rigorous even as the affection is plain. The result straddles field notebook and love letter to the wild. For readers who like their nature writing close-observed, honest, and unhurried, this is Heinrich at his warmest.
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The author
Bernd Heinrich is a German-born American biologist, long based at the University of Vermont, celebrated for field studies of ravens, bees, and insect physiology and for a shelf of nature books - Ravens in Winter, Mind of the Raven, Winter World - that pair hard observation with plain, vivid prose.
The book
Published in 1987 by Princeton University Press, One Man's Owl records Heinrich's three-year relationship with Bubo, a great horned owl he rescued as a nestling. Kept semi-wild around his Maine cabin, the owl becomes a subject for patient study: its maturation, hunting, prey recognition, and the alarm and mobbing it provokes in other animals.
How it reads
The diary form gives the book its charm - day-by-day, tentative, alert to surprise. It sits comfortably beside classics of owl-keeping, and its blend of formal science and open wonder has kept it in print, including a later abridged edition.
For more context
Pair it with Heinrich's raven books, or with Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk for a darker take on living with a bird of prey.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Bernd Heinrich
- Publisher
- Princeton
- Place of publication
- Princeton, New Jersey
- Year
- 1987
- ISBN
- 0-691-08470-X
- Shelf
- Nature
- Location
- Maine
Heinrich — Maine naturalist