Book review: Alfie and Me, by Carl Safina
Carl Safina’s account of how he and his family adopted a screech owl, named her Alfie and raised her to adulthood is, on one level, the story of human beings thrown in close contact with a familiar but wild animal. He digs much deeper, however, than Sterling North did for raccoons in “Rascal” and Margarete Sigl Corbo did for backyard birds in “Arnie, the Darling Starling.” You can imagine Safina driving around with one of those “Who rescued who?” bumper stickers, but with his showing a silhouette of an owl instead of a dog or cat.
Yet “Alfie and Me” is more than that. Safina is determined to turn this experience into a window on humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature. Reading it sent me back to William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence.” Like Blake, Safina sees the world in a grain of sand, holds infinity in the palm of his hand. In addition to Blake’s poetic insight, Safina brings a great deal of scientific knowledge to his work; he is a renowned ecologist, the author of numerous acclaimed books and a MacArthur fellow.
Safina’s primary theme is how inattention numbs connection and leaves us living a less passionate life, less aware of our vast animalian community. But learning how to stay connected requires practice and knowledge. “To be human is to ask questions,” he says simply. And ask them he does. Often, if not always, Safina’s interrogation of each interaction results in provocative, insightful asides, a pulling-together of the many tributaries of attention to a particular animal, employing his career in the life sciences and the vast reading of world literatures and philosophies that flow into his sprawling narrative.
Like the contemporary naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Safina is determined to see through labels, biases and assumptions when regarding the natural world and our place in it. He wants to interact on a personal level with an individual animal. He knows that a squirrel is not a field-guide distillation of identifying traits. It is an individual living creature. It has eyes, hands, feet, hunger, fear. Like us, it scurries around seeking food and avoiding danger. Like us, it has a history that traces back to the big bang. Safina lacks Haupt’s lyrical grace, but his thinking aloud still makes for lively and exciting conversation with an author — spontaneous, if not polished; vivid, if not elegant. Describing Alfie’s behavior, Safina writes: “She might perhaps even pounce on the occasional mouse who’d sniffed out some birdseed I’d sprinkle in there, so she would not forget what her talons and her fascination with motion were for or how to use them at speed.”
Safina and his wife and children permit Alfie the run of their spacious home on Long Island, then move her out to a coop, then leave its door open, then continue to feed her as she hunts and returns to this doting family. She finds a mate whom they dub Plus-One. With the second-guessing of a Trollope hero, Safina worries over each step: “I joked with Patricia that I was trying not to feel too hurt or left out. Then I wondered if I was entirely joking.” Despite this kind of remark, Safina seldom steps back enough to see the humor in his helicoptering of a different species. He is a fussy foster parent.
How he worries about this little bird! He worries that she won’t eat (she does), won’t fledge (she does) and that she may get killed in a storm (she doesn’t). He worries about the effects of his intervention in Alfie’s life. He refrains from jazz drumming during Alfie and Plus-One’s “courtship.” At times Safina frets until he seems worn, as my mother used to say, to a frazzle. This fussiness derives in part from his urgent seriousness. But even an admirable desire to preach connectedness — because he knows that we care to protect only what we love — can become tiresome when the author keeps revisiting favorite points.
Safina also maintains a greeting-card cuteness throughout. He refers to their dogs as “doggies,” describes the mated owls as “honeymooners” and their mating as “so much bonking going on.” Afterward, Safina speculates that Alfie was “too in love and perhaps too well-fed by Plus-One” to return to him or take food. He even entitles his acknowledgments page “Gratitudes” and writes it as beatitudes, beginning by bestowing a halo on people such as himself: “Blessed are the compassionate, who find wild babes rendered helpless by circumstance and feel moved to help.”
I’m glad that people feel moved to help and that well-informed writers feel moved to share their stories. There is no larger theme than the intricacies of our relationship with a single other living individual, human or otherwise. And scientific knowledge of life’s intricacy only deepens the intuitive insights of the past. “Alfie and Me” is a colorful if uneven guide to living more deeply through interaction with others who share our experience of inhabiting an animal form. “What is the best we can make of our existence?” asks Safina. “Connection. That’s my answer.” The book ends with Alfie still a part of their lives.
Michael Sims’s books about nature include “Adam’s Navel” and “In the Womb: Animals,” a companion book to the National Geographic Channel series.
Alfie and Me
What Owls Know, What Humans Believe
By Carl Safina
W.W. Norton. 384 pp. $32.50
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