House Guest

OWL by William Service. 92 pages. Knopf. $4.

"The ancients," writes William Service, "attributed to the owl great wisdom. I, more careful, attribute to him the keenest appetite to find things out." The same might be said of Service himself. His Owl is less the result of wisdom than of a keen if bemused curiosity. No man can know all about a bird, especially a screech owl who possesses, as the book jacket puts it, the proportions of a beer can and the personality of a bank president. But a year of open-minded daily contact with such a creature is bound to lead to something, and in this case it has led to one of the most elegant and perceptive pieces of nature writing since T. H. White fell in with a goshawk.

Owl (his name as well as his kind) arrived in the already pet-filled Service household in a coffee can borne by children. He had apparently tumbled out of a nest, later proving, while still an owlet, his general incompetence in such matters by repeatedly walking off the edge of a table. Too little to be abandoned once more to the hazards of the woods, he stayed, ate eagerly and soon learned to fly and hunt. He also solved the family cat and dog problem. Chirring fiercely, he fixed them with a furious yellow stare and threw a hex on them. "The animal which looks back at you with two eyes at once," maintains Service, "tends to stand high in the local food chain, i.e., not one of nature's victims."

Owl scrupulously avoids the fallen archness common among animal books. Service is fascinated by Owl as owl, not homunculus, and comes forth with a number of unexpected facts about the species. Owls' eyes, for example, do not move in their sockets. And Owl, Service found, could not see his own feet, or focus on anything closer than eight or ten inches away. For all Service could tell, owls may even see double all the time. Yet in the dimmest light Owl could spot a small moth 20 feet away--if it moved, and provided he was hungry.

The author admits to the impossibility of considering Owl without indulging in a certain amount of anthropomorphism--"he postures too much; he walks about hobbling like an old man with hands clasped behind back." But as a fair observer, Service, a writer and amateur naturalist, points out that human logic isn't much help in understanding a screech owl. For one thing, how do you know what the bird is thinking when, say, he shreds a piece of spinach into 55 fragments before leaving it? Or why he reacts with evident horror to the sight of an upright moving stick? Or why, though something of a gourmet, Owl once consumed a lucky rabbit's foot down to the metal clip? "Since I can't get a reasonable answer, I suggest he doesn't know why himself," observes Service, adding judiciously: "Perhaps he is losing his mind."

In the end, Owl died one day with no more warning than had marked his arrival. In the family's routine he left "a very small blank--precisely owl-shaped." Service's very small book is not precisely owl-shaped, but it serves most excellently to fill a blank in an attentive reader's life that hardly anyone would suspect was there.

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