In her New York Times best-selling books, Charlottesville resident, naturalist, and science writer Jennifer Ackerman delights readers with the latest research about bird behavior. Her newest release, What an Owl Knows (Penguin, 2024), introduces us to birds like the late Papa G’Ho, a rescue owl at the Wildlife Center of Virginia in Waynes- boro, who served as a foster parent to owlets. His fierce devotion led Virginia Living to once name him the state’s Coolest Dad. In this edited conversation, she describes why birds fascinate us.
Q: What draws you to birds?
A: For me it’s almost a spiritual experience, I just love observing another form of life and thinking about how birds might experience the world.
Q: Why are we so interested in them?
A: It’s partly flight. It’s also song. Birdsong is just so beautiful and often musical. And over the ages, birds have really been kind of thought of as visitors from the spirit world, from another realm.
Q: Your work has taken you around the globe—and Virginia. Tell us about joining researchers to band Northern saw-whet owls in the Powhatan Wildlife Management Area.
A: They’re very, very hard to spot. One of the best experiences I had was to go out on Halloween with mist nets to capture them and talking to the people who are doing the work. The first time I held the owl it was just so transporting and powerful. They’re the owl on the cover of my book. They’re small and so cute, but they’re really, really ferocious hunters.
Q: Is Virginia a good place to see birds?
A: Absolutely, we’ve got all the shorebirds on the coastal areas and marshes, and then warblers passing through… woodpeckers and owls and herons—just the full gamut. When I
moved into my house in Charlottesville, the people that had been there before me said that my yard had 80 species. Virginia is just a terrific place to bird.
Learn more about falconry here.
This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue.
