From wolves that follow a girl in the snow to lions visiting their grandchild, Matthew Cordell’s picture books reveal his wonder and awe toward animals. Never has this been more apparent than in To See an Owl (Random House Studio, Jan. 7), the story of a young girl’s relentless quest to see her first owl in the wild. Illustrated in vibrant pen-and-ink illustrations, Cordell’s book touches on themes of perseverance and connections with nature. A birder himself, the Caldecott Medalist drew on his own awe-inspiring experiences with owls to color this heartwarming tale. Our starred review notes that the title is “easily summed up in a single word: magic.” We spoke with him over Zoom to discuss this magical book of nature. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You write in the book, “To see an owl is magic.” Why, compared to other birds or other animals, do you think this is true?

They’re so secretive, so quiet, so well hidden, that if you try hard enough and look hard enough, it’s very much like a blessing [to finally see one]. I mean, they’re so camouflaged, too. It’s just such an impossible feat in some ways. And they could be anywhere. If you ever go on walks in nature, looking for one thing specifically in the density of the woods is so challenging; it feels like magic when you can finally lay eyes on the thing that you’re looking for.

This book has a strong theme of perseverance. Did you start with the theme or with owls? How did you combine the two?

After I started birding, it slowly occurred to me that the one bird I hadn’t looked for and had never seen was an owl. I knew there were owls in my area; I’d just never seen one. It’s nearly impossible to find a hidden owl in the daytime. And so I was just searching and searching for one, and then one night was a full moon night, and we were walking down this trail, and all of a sudden this great horned owl just flew up and landed on top of an evergreen tree. I’ll never forget it. We were so close, too, which I just found so strange, because I think it was curious about us or wasn’t concerned about us. It just let us stand there and observe it for a while. And I got some pictures of it silhouetted by the full moon, and so ever since, I’ve just been obsessed. I mean, I was already obsessed with not seeing them, but I just became more obsessed. In terms of perseverance, it took me so long [to finally see one]. It was learning about their habitats, learning about their behaviors.

A lot of the book’s pages have separate panels or images within images, much like graphic novels and comics. Did those things influence you?

I’ve been a lifelong fan of comics and graphic novels, and so throughout my career as an illustrator, I’ve used a lot of those storytelling devices that comics do so well with panels and with large sections of hand lettering to emphasize noises and sounds and things like that. One of the great things about using panels is that you can show many pictures on a spread, and by looking at them sequentially, you get a sense of the passage of time, where if you just had one or two images per page, you wouldn’t get that. But—talking about persistence and waiting and patience—it’s such a great way to show the change of scenery, the change of weather. [Doing that] helped me to support the idea that a lot of time is going by in this search.

You’ve written and illustrated pretty extensively about animals in general, some of which have been more anthropomorphic. I noticed the great horned owls are rendered quite realistically. How did you land on this stylistic choice? Was it a challenge not to depict a more anthropomorphic owl?

I wanted them to be lifelike and naturalistic. The one thing I amplified was the size of the eyes. I mean, it’s such a defining feature of an owl, the big round eyes. I wanted to draw things with more crosshatching, more detailed line work, and I was also lightly leaning into Japanese styles of animation and illustration, where the eyes are just so big and circular. The main character, Janie, also has those big circular eyes. That big circle disc just gives [the owl] a sense of wonder, and it also stylizes [things] a little bit, too.

There’s a page where the owl is almost camouflaged. Artistically, how were you able to convey camouflage, which is such a crucial part of nature?

It really was just about using similar colors, which is how they hide so well. I wanted to have some sense of an owl seeing the person who’s looking at it, and the person not seeing that bird, because that has to happen so many times while birding or even just being in nature. An animal—not necessarily even an owl, just a very quiet animal—could be sitting there in plain sight, and you’d have no idea an animal was there. It’s a defense mechanism. [The animal] has to be good at hiding itself. I always think, whenever that happens, How many times has that bird watched me walk back and forth? I find it so humorous and also fascinating that animals can do that. It’s just such an interesting concept that the bird in that picture is just sitting there looking at them, and they’re searching and searching in the completely different, wrong direction.

Did you learn anything surprising while researching owls? What did you want young readers to learn about them from your book?

There are so many interesting things about owls that can tell you how to find them, like owl pellets. That was something I had never heard of, that an animal would just eat something whole and then semi-digest it, and then regurgitate the parts that are not necessary. If you’re searching the woods, if you look for trees that have pellets beneath them, it could be that an owl roosts in that tree. I learned a lot of little factoids about owls that I wanted to weave into the book, factoids that were helpful to me. I think it was a subconscious thing—I wanted the story to have elements of nonfiction and fiction, so it wasn’t just some backmatter that has [a bunch of] facts, but to seem more organic.

Your upcoming projects include a picture-book biography of David Bowie and a book about a young boy’s fever dreams. What draws you to such a wide range of topics?

I feel like life is too short to just do one thing, or even to draw one way. I find, from one book to the next, that the way I like to draw changes. If you can be creative in different ways and tell different stories, it just makes life all the richer.

Dan Nolan is an Indie editorial assistant.