Volume 36, Number 20 · December 21, 1989
The Company of Owls
By Robert O. Paxton
North American Owls: Biology and Natural History
by Paul A. Johnsgard, with watercolors by Louis Agassiz Fuertes
Smithsonian Institution Press, 295 pp., $45.00
Owls of the Northern Hemisphere
by Karel H. Voous, illustrated by Ad Cameron
MIT Press, 320 pp., $55.00
No encounter with an owl is a trivial affair. Owls are full of mystery and portent; they are not to be taken casually. Owls have struck the human imagination forcefully from the earliest times. They are pictured in Sumerian tablets accompanying Lilith, the goddess of death. A learned ornithologist later gave the Latin name Athene noctua lilith to the Middle Eastern desert race of the Little Owl (pictured in Voous's book on p. 183). But 'Lilith of the Desert,' Karel Voous tells us, was probably the larger Hume's Owl, Strix butleri, whose mournful cries in the desert night were thought to be a harbinger of death. Hume's Owl is probably also the 'night hag' who will inherit the land of the Lord's enemies in Isaiah 34:14. Owls have never ceased to figure abundantly and ominously in folklore and literature.
Review, 2222 words
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