This is such a beautifully descriptive book that really brings to the fore the author’s love of owls and how much they have impacted on her life. The Lake District is where Polly really encountered owls for the first time and her descriptions of the landscapes and natural history of the area are fascinating. The author brings poetry into this book and her narrative is poignant at times as it tells of her battles with poor health and how nature has healing powers that can never properly be understood.
I learnt a lot from this book as it describes not only the tawny owls of her Grasmere home but also other owls and other places she has lived. There are owls in the woods where I live, I often hear them but rarely see them, just an occasional silhouette at dusk so it was wonderful to share Polly’s encounters as it all really resonated with me. A truly wonderful reading experience and one that I will happily share with others.

Polly Atkin does not profess to be an expert, on owls or anything else. This refreshing book brings the love of birds, especially owls, right from her heart to yours. It also brings the sights, sounds, weather (oh, the weather!) of England’s Lake District right into your sitting room.

In the Company of Owls, we are treated to the author’s observations of the owls that choose to live near her. This nips off to other places she’s lived and visited, which adds richness to her descriptions, but it is her ‘home’ birds, and particularly one year in their lives, that is the main focus.

The author has wonderful descriptive powers, and it is no surprise to glean her interest in poetry from her tale. Her description of the bog habitat where she went looking for short-eared owls is superb, although given the daily walks that provide the basis for her writing about her local owl family as they grow, it is amazing that there is no hint of repetitiveness.

Atkins supports her story with solid research, comparing owl numbers now with the records since Victorian times. These details tend to slip in as anecdotes, and more narrative quotes combine to give a really good picture of how owls have fared over the last century or so.

It’s a very personal record, and she isn’t afraid to reveal her own mistakes, which brought me back after a slight dip in attention in the middle of the book. On the whole, I think this is a really good book for the cosy bird lover, and people who like to know all the birds on their patch, rather than the twitching variety. I’m a patcher, of course.

A beautiful cover and a beautifully written and observed 'ode to owls'! She has a lovely way with words so I will be searching out more of her work after reading this!

But this is her story of her encounters with her owl neighbours in Grasmere. Her first encounter made a lasting impression on her, so she's now watching out for them wherever she goes, by sight or sound, and it's lovely to see how involved she becomes in looking out for them if they needed help, especially around nesting time.

She includes lots of background on different varieties of owls, and also shares how humans have impacted on their habitats. From her own perspective she shares how lockdown impacted on her as she has a chronic illness, and having a chronic illness myself I really connected with her experience and how being out in nature, distracting yourself from the world, was a saving grace and a better focus of her mind when her health was good enough to be out and about.

I loved her use of poetry about owls, and her descriptions of nature was really evocative so this made for such an enchanting read, and a really lovely nature book. Highly recommended!

For me, The Company of Owls is a match made in heaven: gorgeous writing and owls. Since reading Polly Atkin's Much With Body, a poetry collecti0n, I've often found solace in her writing. The Company of Owls achieves this too, because while it charts the tawny owls living near Atkin's home in Grasmere, it also explores chronic illness, insomnia and finding connection with the outside world.

I've found myself telling people everything I've learned about owls through Atkin's weaving of anecdote, natural history and research. It is a collection of essays which will both move and enlighten the reader - particularly the linear essays following the tawny owlets!

And as the cherry on top, even Atkin's acknowledgments are touching - as upon finishing this comforting read, I also wished the owls delicious voles for the rest of time.

The author loves owls but until fairly recently has rarely seen them. Where she lived originally in the Lake District, she often heard them but only saw one briefly in Grasmere. She left the area for a while but moved back to Grasmere a little under 10 years ago. Again owls were "singing" her to sleep. She would say that she is no expert but is a watcher. This book is about her observation of owls and other things as well as her life more generally.

While this is about owls in the Lake District in particular, there is quite a bit about owls worldwide and historically. I did learn a number of things that I had not been aware of before. I certainly wasn't aware of just how long owls had been around for! The information on owls generally was interesting though maybe not a reason for buying this book solely for that. The author's health has not been good generally and at times quite poor. Issues about aloneness, isolation and covid for example are mentioned here. While I do have enormous sympathy for the author and her health generally, I never really felt connected to that aspect of this book sadly.

As this is about the Lake District it will probably not surprise people to know that Wordsworth gets a look in here. Literature about owls, Grasmere and the Lakes more widely are part of this and that will appeal to people. The author's observations of owls (& owlets) come to this as a diary narrative quite often and I did enjoy reading about it. Much of the minutia of owls lives is here and fascinating. Her owl sightings are generally quite close to her home. It was interesting to me that the app she used to identify bird calls was often very unreliable!

For me there is some great observational natural history in this book. I think some observers might consider some parts of this to be intrusive as far as wildlife is concerned however that will always be a tricky area of observation. I guess I did feel that things found on the Internet and fed to the author interested me less than her own personal observations. Ultimately there were parts of this book that I really did find very interesting. However they were quite well buried at times and other aspects of the book didn't really grab me.

“Don’t go with so much grasping in your heart and you may be lucky. Let go of your longing and you might be lucky.”

Rarely have I felt more at home in a book, rarely have it felt so understood by a narrative.

Polly Atkin’s wonderful journey through her own experiences with (not exclusively) tawny owls created such a deep, pure connection to nature that I might never forget. I felt like a visitor in Polly’s world, in the world of the owls, the babies, the adolescents and the adults.

I love the ideas the author touches upon such as loving nature from afar, or better, giving animals the space they deserve; or, her musings on human disturbances. I love the beautiful, not necessarily scientific, heartwarming explorations of nature, but also the author’s thoughts on her own reasons for burying the owl. This book stirred something in me, more than a laughter that I simply couldn’t suppress when the owls were described as attacking humans.

One things I wish I had gotten from Polly Atkin: photos! I so desperately want to see the owls, the trees, the lakes. (Well, I now follow her on Instagram so I got that in the end.)

Thank you NetGalley, Elliott & Thompson as well as Polly Atkin for providing me with an ARC of this book.

Here is yet another cover that drew me in 100%. So beautiful. However, I found the story to be very long in its narrative. It is told very simply without much of a wow factor. I know the feeling of seeing an owl in their own habitat and it is definitely a wow factor! Even though I know the author was excited at seeing the owls she tells of in her book, that excitement just did not come across on the pages for me. I thank NetGalley and Elliot and Thompson for the advance read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Elliott & Thompson for approving my request to read an arc of this book

Nature and animals are one of my special interests, birds being one of my favourite creatures in wildlife, so I was excited to read this book when I saw the gorgeous cover.
Animals have been known to have a healing nature, even if it’s just looking after them making you also have to care for yourself, at least on a basic level, or even just being in certain animals presence can provide a balm to anxiety, depression or pain. Polly Atkin can attest to this as her story tells of when her illness brought her to her family home for a year and she saw her first glimpse of the owls that would come to mean so much.
This was a beautiful story. I also enjoyed the writing style