For humans, the hoot of an owl in the night can stop us in our tracks, with the ability to both incite awe and raise the hair on the back of our necks. Science writer Jennifer Ackerman, author of the bestselling book “What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds,” remembers standing on a friend’s deck in Turin, Italy, and hearing two Tawny Owls calling to each other in the darkness.

“It was just so eerie and transporting,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, wow, that is their world, and it’s so unlike mine.’” 

The hoots we hear — unique as fingerprints, signaling mates, allies and rivals — are only the beginning. Owls communicate through an array of vocalizations, each with its own context and significance. Their acute sense of hearing gives them the ability to construct a 3-D map of their surroundings and pluck a mouse from the grass without even seeing it. In this interview with Bioneers, Ackerman delves into owls’ impressive abilities, adaptations and “ways of knowing” that show us the intelligence of these enigmatic birds. You can read more about owls, including their ability to learn, in this excerpt from “What an Owl Knows.”

Bioneers: As you note in the introduction to your book, owls have specific meanings in many cultures, from symbols of wisdom to harbingers of death or victory. They appear in cave paintings, mythology, and stories, from ancient times to the present day (enter: Hedwig and her Hogwarts colleagues). It always feels special to encounter an owl in the wild (or in a backyard, for that matter). What do you think makes owls so evocative in the human imagination? 

Jennifer Ackerman: I think it’s really a combination of things. I think we see ourselves in them. They have these round heads and forward-facing eyes, and some species even look kind of baby faced and cute. I think this resemblance to us is one reason that some cultures have viewed them as intelligent, such as the Greeks associating owls with the goddess of wisdom, Athena. But at the same time, they’re so radically different from us and from other birds, too. They’re creatures of the night and so well adapted to the world of darkness, which is a world we can’t navigate very well ourselves. They’re quiet in their flight, so they come and go without a sound. How they appear and disappear out of the dark without any kind of advance notice is kind of spooky. Living things really aren’t supposed to do that. Owls really break the rules in a way. I think that’s why we sometimes consider them almost supernatural, and they have a kind of mystical presence for us. It’s this whole package of the familiar and the strange and the mysterious and uncanny that really makes these birds so exciting and also sometimes so disturbing and troubling for people. 

Bioneers: We mentioned the cultural association with wisdom, but that hasn’t typically been how scientists and those who work with owls have assessed them. How do owls challenge our traditional notions of animal intelligence? Why do you think some have viewed owls as more instinctual than intelligent? 

Ackerman: I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about bird intelligence, and I’m going to give you a roundabout answer to this question because I really think our understanding of the mind of other animals is still in its infancy. We tend to see intelligence through our own lens. Other creatures are intelligent if they can do the kinds of things that we do. But I do think there’s a growing awareness that there are different kinds of intelligence. There are different ways of knowing in the animal world, and we’re becoming more appreciative of that as we learn more about it. 

There are different ways of knowing in the animal world, and we’re becoming more appreciative of that as we learn more about it. 

On the question of owl intelligence, the science has swung back and forth quite dramatically. For a long time, it was just assumed that their behavior was hard-wired. They don’t demonstrate the kinds of intelligence that we can measure easily, such as physical problem solving, which we can measure well in crows and parrots. I think what we’ve come to understand is that owls may not be smart in the same ways that parrots and corvids [such as crows, jays, and magpies] are smart, but they have big brains for their body size, just as other birds do in some families. In “The Genius of Birds,” the way I define genius is this knack for knowing what you’re doing in your environment, and I think owls are really superb at that. They sense and navigate their world through super acute hearing and sound location. Their knowledge and ways of knowing are very different from ours, but I think that’s one of the things that makes them so intriguing.

Bioneers: The excerpt from your book gives the example of how owls can be trained to come to a whistle in less than a day, demonstrating their ability to learn. What other compelling evidence have you found that exemplifies owls’ intelligence? 

Ackerman: While writing the book, I learned from those who train owls and other raptors, usually as ambassador birds for education, that owls were once thought to be unintelligent because they were difficult to train. But what we’ve learned in the past decade or so is that it’s really we who need the training, because owl behavior and knowledge is very subtle and complex. It’s hard to read their body language, and we’re beginning to understand that they grasp a lot more than we thought they did. They’re just much more subtle in the ways that they express their responses. 

Genes involved with flexibility of behavior, which is connected with intelligence, are also evolving.

One of the measures of intelligence is how flexible a creature is in response to new challenges in its environment, and we’ve realized owls are very flexible in this way. I think in particular of Barred Owls and Burrowing Owls that are adapting to life in the city. That requires great flexibility of behavior. They’re being faced with new challenges all the time. One of my favorite examples is the Burrowing Owls in South America, which have been studied over the past couple of decades. As the owls’ normal habitat disappeared because of agricultural development, they’ve moved into cities, and scientists have been studying them to try to understand how they have adapted so well. I spent time in the suburbs of Maringá in Brazil, and I couldn’t believe that these birds were just going about their breeding business in the middle of this suburb with loud music playing and bicycles going by and horns honking. It turns out that the brains of these birds are adapting very quickly. For instance, some of the genes that are involved in their ability to tune out ambient noise and focus on finding a food source have evolved. Genes involved with flexibility of behavior, which is connected with intelligence, are also evolving. So there are changes that are happening behaviorally and in the genetic makeup of these birds to adapt to city life.

We’ve also learned that owls learn throughout their lives, so they are not just hardwired with instinctive knowledge. They can learn from their environment and they can learn from each other, and I think that’s really good evidence of owl intelligence. The other evidence is their sophisticated communication skills. They have much more elaborate vocalizations than we ever imagined. 

Bioneers: Given their nocturnal lives and the relative size of their eyes, owls obviously have amazing vision. But in the book, you also spend quite a bit of time exploring their truly extraordinary hearing and vocalization abilities, which are likely a set of skills that most of us don’t think about when (if) we take the time to consider, as you put it, “what it’s like to be an owl.” What really struck a chord with you?

Ackerman: I’m really fascinated by the sense of hearing in owls. I think it’s just so exquisitely sensitive, and at least for some species, like barn owls, it’s almost unequaled in the animal world. Unlike humans, owls don’t lose their hearing cells as they age, so their hearing remains acute throughout their lifetime. That’s an indicator of just how vital it is to their survival. In some species, the asymmetrical placement of their ears, one higher than the other, gives them the ability to really precisely locate the source of a sound, even the faintest sound, in three-dimensional space. All of that sound processing is happening very fast. The brain is comparing sounds arriving at each ear — how loud they are, which ear detects them first, and other information — in a matter of microseconds and telling an owl where to direct its strike. I think it’s quite amazing how this process of sound localization has evolved, and how it gives these birds this incredibly precise ability to locate their prey in total darkness. 

I also have special affection for owl vocalizations, partly because I’m a communicator myself. People used to ask me what my favorite bird was, and I would tell them it was the Black-capped Chickadee, because it has one of the most sophisticated communication systems of any land animal. Then I learned about the vocalizations of owls, which may not be at the same level as chickadees but were one of the really delightful surprises of the book. Like most people, I thought, “Oh, owls hoot. That’s hardwired, and that’s all they do. There’s no vocal learning involved. It’s very simple.” But it turns out, those hoots are really filled with meaning. Owls have different kinds of hoots as well as different kinds of vocalizations. They chitter, and squawk and squeal, and all these vocalizations have very specific meanings and are used in specific contexts for specific purposes. I think it’s fascinating what we’re beginning to unearth, some of it with the help of technology such as machine learning. It’s helping us to understand in detail the individuality of an owl’s vocalizations and how you can actually fingerprint an owl with its individual hoots. That’s how the birds recognize each other and recognize mates, allies and rivals, all through these individual hoots, which are indicators of their individual identity. In Great Horned Owls, the owl chicks start to vocalize in the egg. You can hear their little chitters inside the egg. I thought that was pretty amazing. 

Bioneers: Humans are clearly captivated by owls, as seen with Barry the Barred Owl and Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl, both of whom lived in Central Park and sadly died unnaturally (Barry by colliding with a truck and Flaco with a building). What do you hope a greater scientific understanding of owls, in combination with this natural captivation, can lead to when it comes to conservation?  

Ackerman: It’s a really good question. I have so much gratitude for the scientists and the researchers who are doing the hard work to understand owls and how they use their habitats so that we can protect them — both the birds and the habitats. I’m grateful to them for the light that they shed on these real marvels of owl biology and behavior. I think that those windows on these very mysterious birds awaken wonder and awe in people, and it helps them both understand owls and also love them and want to save them. On this point, I like to quote Rachel Carson, the great naturalist and writer and an inspiration for me. Carson wrote that “the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the life around us, the less taste we shall have for its destruction.” And I think that really captures what scientists and researchers can do; they can open our eyes to the wonder and reality of these birds.