ALFIE AND ME

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.