Book Review: The Book of the Barn Owl by Sally Coulthard

 

A rather cheap and small but still interesting-looking non-fiction I recently picked up from the bookstore!

As the title indicates, this is a non-fiction book about barn owls. It delves into various aspects of them, such as their behavior, reproduction, ageing and development, social lives and hunting techniques. 

This was a really neat book to be honest! It's not super long (being a rather small book with only 200 or so pages) or mega in-depth, but it still gets the job done and it does have enough content to not disappoint the reader. It's also illustrated quite richly with beautiful and realistic drawings of barn owls. I do have a basic knowledge myself about barn owls going into this book, but I still learned quite a few new things about them. 

I guess that if the reader really wants a more in-depth look at the species, this book might just have a tad too little information with how brief it is, but I still wasn't disappointed by its contents. There is depth and a lot of topics regarding the species are touched on, it just doesn't have a huge page count to really delve deep into everything. But for someone who is just starting out to learn about (barn) owls, this makes for a good book to get started with.

If there is a criticism I do have, it's that this book is really UK-centric when it comes to their barn owl information. Which isn't inherently a problem, as far as I can tell none of the information is false or anything. But I just wish that the book would've given more information about barn owls in other parts of the world or heck even just mainland Europe. These topics are briefly mentioned sometimes, but never really touched on. 

The author really only gives us a close look at owls in the United Kingdom which just feels very small-scale, especially when there's other barn owl species spread almost worldwide. I'd have loved to learn more about the eastern or American barn owl species, or heck even also about western in mainland Europe. I wouldn't have been a disappointed if this book had been titled something along the lines of The Barn Owl in the United Kingdom, but the title The Book of the Barn Owl really gives the reader the idea that it'll be about the species as a whole. It's not really a direct flaw or anything, but it just feels so small-scale when the species is much more widespread than just the UK, plus the title doesn't exactly give the reader the idea that we'll only be talking about barn owls in a small portion of the entire world. 

Overall this is still a great book, though! The UK-centric-ness aside, it still covers a lot of information and is delivered to the reader in an easily digestible writing voice.

Rating: 4/5