The Barn Owls [Paperback]

Tony Johnston's THE BARN OWLS recalls in quiet tones the memory of a barn that has stood alone in a wheat field for one hundred years at least. The owls have nested there and have hunted in the fields and circled in the night skies as time slowly slipped by. Every night, as the moon rises, a barn owl awakens and flies out to hunt. Feathered against the endless starry night, he swoops and sails to the darkened wheat field below and catches a mouse in his nimble talons. With outstretched wings, this barn owl returns to his barn nest and his hungry family, repeating the ageless ritual his ancestors have practiced here, in this barn, for at least one hundred years. Following the life cycle of the barn owl, this gentle poem evokes a sense of warm sunshine and envelopes readers with the memory of the scent of a wheat field.From Johnston (An Old Shell), poetic phrases that follow a ghostly barn owl through days and nights, suns and moons.

Barn owls have been nesting and roosting, hunting and hatching in the barn and its surroundings for as long as the barn has housed spiders, as long as the wheat fields have housed mice, a hundred years at least. The repetition of alliterative words and the hushed hues of the watercolors evoke the soundless, timeless realm of the night owl through a series of spectral scenes. Short, staccato strings of verbs describe the age-old actions and cycles of barn owls, who forever grow up/and sleep/and wake/and blink/and hunt for mice. Honey-colored, diffused light glows in contrast to the night scenes of barn owls blinking awake. A glimpse into the hidden campestral world of the elusive barn owl.
—Kirkus Reviews

Soft, striking, double-page spreads focus on a family of barn owls that lives in a century-old California barn, which is made of redwood and surrounded by oak trees and fields of wheat. A few words of simple, poetic text accompany each picture, stressing the ebb and flow oflS±