Artist and avid ornithologist, Matt Sewell has built a brand from writing and distinctively illustrating informative yet appealing books about birds. In Our Garden Birds and Our Songbirds, he presented two volumes, each exploring 52 favorite species from England--one bird for each week of the year. In Owls: Our Most Charming Bird, Sewell branches out beyond Great Britain and offers a worldwide compendium of various owls, nocturnal birds of prey. Watercolors rendered in Pop Art style and concise, lively prose highlight the individuality of 50 species of owls indigenous to diverse regions of the world.
Sewell explores woodland varieties like the Northern Saw-whet Owl--native to North America--which is "smaller-than-a-blackbird and fluffier-than-a-three-week-old Labrador" and has "pleading, puppy-dog eyes" etched with a permanent look of surprise. The Great Gray Owl, with a head like a "geodesic dome inhabited by a bunch of strung-out hippies," is considered a wilderness variety, a stealthy hunter built to survive in northern, glacial environments. The Elf Owl is one of the smallest that loves cacti and inhabits the Wild West deserts of the U.S. and Mexico. The Crested Owl, indigenous to tropical Central and South American climates, has eyebrows that appear like "incredible appendages" and serve as camouflage when the bird is pretending to be a branch.
This playful, well-conceived collection enhances--and also shatters--myths and folklore surrounding these "all-seeing, all-knowing" mysterious and imperious avian hunters, and proves entertaining and enriching in the process. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines