Alfie and Me

June 1, 2023

With Alfie and Me, ecologist Safina relates bonding with an injured baby owl he and his wife rescued and what it taught them; now freed, Alfie continues to visit them as she raises her own brood (eight pages of color photos). Prepub Alert.

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August 15, 2023
An award-winning ecologist examines his transformative connection to a bird. When Safina, the author of Beyond Words and Becoming Wild, rescued a screech owl nestling, he did not foresee the transcendent relationship he would forge with the tiny bird that he named Alfie. He and his wife nursed her back to health, hoping to release her into the wild once she was healed. But when her flight feathers were slow to emerge, Safina worried about her ability to fly; then he worried that she would not molt, also putting her in peril. He worried, too, that her "protracted protective custody" would interfere with her hunting instincts. "Did Alfie realize that she was an owl?" he wondered. As Safina lyrically recounts his observations of and interactions with Alfie, he reflects on spirituality, reverence, and the contrast between Indigenous, traditional Asian, and Western ways of being and knowing. Indigenous peoples, he writes, "understand the world as relationships," while Western thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, and Bacon proclaimed mind-body dualism that taught us "to loathe our natural selves" and underlies our estrangement from nature. He argues vociferously against the materialistic reductionism that he sees prevalent in modern biology. "I happen to find the material world rather wondrous," he writes. Alfie, he asserts, "is a seer of things, a holder of deep innate knowledge." She has brought him the gift of perceiving "what is possible when we soften our sense of contrast at the species boundary." Although photographs of Alfie reveal an adorable bird--in one, she kisses Safina on the lips--readers may be put off by his portrayal of her in human terms: When she responds to a male's courtship, for example, he describes them as hesitant lovers; when they finally copulate, he calls them honeymooners, "performing a mainly emotional function." Nonetheless, the author amply conveys a sense of Alfie's "consistent magic" and essential mystery. A fervent homage to a dynamic, interdependent universe.

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Starred review from August 21, 2023
Stony Brook University ecology professor Safina (Becoming Wild) shares the moving story of how he and his wife, Patricia, rescued and rehabilitated an orphaned eastern screech owl they named Alfie. Safina, a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, took in the bird in 2018 after receiving a tip about a baby owl that had fallen out of its nest. Nursing Alfie back to health, the Safinas let her roam freely about their house and gradually acclimated her to the outdoors, keeping the owlet first in a chicken coop and then leaving the coop door open so she could come and go as she pleased. Safina continued providing Alfie meals until she learned to hunt on her own, and she eventually found a mate, dubbed Plus-One, with whom she raised a brood. Philosophical musings on humanity’s beliefs about nature add intellectual rigor to the heartwarming story; Safina laments how Plato’s view of the spiritual world as distinct from and superior to the material world led Western society to devalue nature, a perspective Safina contrasts critically with Native American cultures that believe animals are “thinking and emotional beings who have minds, communicate among themselves, act with agency on their own behalf.” Stirring and ruminative, this is an excellent complement to Irene Pepperberg’s Alex and Me. Agent: Jennifer Weltz, Jean V. Naggar Literary.

Starred review from September 1, 2023
Ecologist and highly lauded writer Safina's lyrical titles usually deal with larger subjects, such as the oceans (Eye of the Albatross, 2002) or the intelligence and emotions of animals (Becoming Wild, 2020). Here he delves into a more personal relationship, beginning when he and his wife were presented with an eastern screech owl chick that was very close to dying. Saving and living with Alfie, as they named her, was supposed to be short term; they planned to raise her until she could fly and reliably feed herself. When it became clear that her flight feathers weren't coming in normally, they kept her. What follows is a wonderfully intimate account of Safina's relationship with Alfie and what she taught him about lives in a ""parallel reality adjacent to human experience."" Being forced to live at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic allowed the author to closely watch Alfie during her slow release and learning to live as a wild owl. She finally mated and produced a clutch of chicks. Interwoven with Safina's broad experience with other cultures' views on animals and the world and of how they related to Alfie's life, and richly illustrated with photographs, this a beautifully illuminating work of up-close natural history.

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