Wholesale Wesley the Owl by Stacey O'Brien

[Atria] This New York Times bestseller is a “sweet, quirky memoir” (USA TODAY) about a biologist and the baby barn owl that changed her life. On Valentine’s Day 1985, biologist Stacey O’Brien adopted Wesley, a baby barn owl with an injured wing who could not have survived in the wild. Over the next nineteen years, O’Brien studied Wesley’s strange habits with both a tender heart and a scientist’s eye—and provided a mice-only diet that required her to buy the rodents in bulk. She watched him turn from a helpless fluff ball into an avid com­municator with whom she developed a language all their own. Eventually he became a gorgeous, gold-and-white macho adult with a heart-shaped face who preened in the mir­ror and objected to visits by any other males to “his” house. In this “honest, vivid, and revealing account” (Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus), O’Brien also brings us inside Caltech’s prestigious research community where resident owls sometimes flew freely from