Polly Atkin’s The Company of Owls explores the hauntingly beautiful and brutally honest lives of the wild owls living in England as well as Polly’s personal experience with Ehlers Danlos syndrome. Using her memories to build a bridge between nature and wellness, Polly shows us how living amongst the owls has helped shape her life going forward. Each chapter is dedicated to the owls that Polly has observed, recording their quirky mannerisms, their unwavering ability to love, and their fight for survival. Atkin’s voice is ethereal and gentle, guiding us through the life stages of an owl, viewed from below the treetops and through glass window panes. 

Polly Atkin is wildly inspiring and has offered me an abundance of motivation. Reading The Company of Owls was an emotional, soulful experience and I cannot recommend this memoir enough. Every page felt like taking a nice, long walk with a friend. 

Our interview was conducted in April 2026 over Google Docs.

Tyler Sidoran : Throughout your book, you make connections between yourself and the owls. For example, in the chapter Onlihede, you give us a list of your similarities and differences. Today, in what ways are you like an owl now or not, after writing your memoir?

Polly Atkin : I love this question. Every way I am like an owl in the book still stands, but I’m always learning, and the book has brought me so many stories of owls from other people, so I’d add ‘not living how you expect me to live’ to the similarities, after one wonderful reader in the Netherlands told me about short eared owls near them who lived amongst long eared owls in the trees. Probably also ‘only wants to be observed when I’m mentally prepared for it’. This is implicit in the book, but I don’t put it in the list. The owls said this was a mistake. 

TS : In the chapter Owls of Lakeland you give us a lot of fascinating information about owls. You tell us about different species of owl, their behaviors, some historical facts, and even scholarly quotes. How much owl research did you do when writing this memoir, and how much knowledge did you already know prior? 

PA : I realised as soon as we started seeing the tawny owls regularly that I knew really very little about their lives – only surface gleanings really – so I had to do a lot of research. That’s when I discovered that there’s this weird lacuna around tawny owls where, despite them being the UKs most common owl, and many people raising injured or orphaned owls, they’ve been considered so mysterious and unknowable. This is beginning to change I think with nest cams and other technology that allows us to observe without disturbing. I was a research student before I began writing nonfiction, and I love a deep dive into a subject. If I’d had more time I would have read even more, and done more observational studies, but that’s harder for me to fit in with my conditions. 

TS : You use a lot of beautiful, vivid sensory details when you write scenes— such as the line on page 92, “ The early bluebells are glowing on the dark hill as if they’ve been daubed with UV paint, and the pillars colour-match as they skitter over the fell tops.” Do you have any advice for novice writers like myself? How do you personally remember vivid details when recreating scenes? 

PA : Thank you! I have a very visual memory and way of thinking, so part of it is just trying to capture how I experience something as it’s happening – I’ll be really aware of all my surroundings, the scents, the quality of light – all of that. But I also have a really patchy memory. I used to carry a notebook around with me and write down any impression that struck me as important or notable. Now I tend to use voicenotes on my phone, and take lots of photos to help me write myself back into the moment. That’s the key thing, I think, to be able to transport yourself as writer and then your reader too, back into the moment as it happened. 

TS : You often mention growing concerns for the owls, their homes, their food sources, and their survival. How are you continuing to raise awareness after the release of your book? Do you have any advice for those who want to help?

PA : Talking about it always helps, with as many people as possible. I’ve worked with the local dark skies group to raise awareness around light pollution, and with other local bodies who focus on conservation. I’d like to do more, but it’s hard to balance with my health conditions and the amount of functional time I have spare (negligible!). This is one of the reasons I write – it’s the one thing I can generally do.  The winter after UK publication of the book, storms destroyed the owl box the three owlets were born and raised in, as I write about happening with the songbird nesting boxes in the book. I was able to get in touch with the owner of the wood, a lovely woman who really cares for it, and she put up two replacements in different places, in the hope one or other of them might be deemed suitable. That was last January, and I think a bit late for nesting last year. I’m hoping one is occupied this spring, but we’ll wait and see. Things like that can be so helpful, but it really centres on you getting to know your local owl population and what they need. What are the main things affecting them? Is it habitat, safe food sources, human intervention or persecution? It is light pollution? What can you best do to help? You might want to get involved with local wildlife groups or conservation groups. 

TS : You touch on the ethics of land preservation, owl protection, and human intervention throughout your piece, especially in the chapters Burying The Owl, Branching Out Early and Day Owls on The Lonely Moor. When it comes to human intervention or tampering, where do you stand?

PA: It depends what kind of intervention it is, and who it is for. Humans have such devastating affects on the lives of other beings around them, I think we all owe it to our wild neighbours to care for them as best we can. That might be improving habitats, like putting up nest boxes if there aren’t suitable natural nest sites. Most importantly, I think we should all fervently fight persecution of birds and animals. As for intervening more actively? My feelings are very ambiguous. I think it’s very hard to know, as humans, what wild things need and what they want, unless we know them very well. In the book I recount how I almost took an owlet, or maybe two owlets, from their parents, because a visitor with self-declared experience of raising owlets worried me so much about them. I only stopped when I heard the parent and saw them come to the chick. Sometime between me meeting the visitor and the next morning, one of the owlets disappeared. I don’t know what happened to them. Were they ‘rescued’ (the woman did talk about doing this herself) or were they predated? All I know is that one owlet survived and carried on living happily with their parents. To me, that’s the ideal result – that the creature survives in the wild with their own family. But obviously there are times that can’t happen. There’s a guy in Yorkshire, Robert E Fuller, who has tawny owls on his property who he feeds when food is in low supply, and who he has rehomed orphaned owlets with successfully many times. We have a tiny back garden in our rented home so no opportunity to do anything but continue to hope the owls feast on the mice and voles in our walls and attic. Would I intervene more if I owned land, and the owls were my actual tenants? Maybe. We feed our small birds through the winter, and our red squirrels now, although people have mixed opinions about that supplemental feeding. The key to me is recognising why you’re doing it. Is it for you – to entertain you or make you feel good? – or is it for the wild things themselves. It should always be the latter. Your enjoyment is a bonus but should never be the drive. 

TS : To continue off of the previous question, do you think there are any crucial differences or similarities in environmental justice between the UK and the US? Do you have any special advice for your American readers?

PA : There are a lot of similarities, and a lot of differences too. We are a small island with a lot of different habitats and different inhabitants all wedged up against one another, which changes what is possible and what is normal sometimes. We also have more open common land, even if much less in England than in Scotland, where there has always been right to roam, and this changes ordinary people’s relationship with the land I think. National Parks in the UK, like the one I live in, are lived spaces, free to enter and visit, and dwelt in over thousands of years. Although there can be a lot of complacency about environmental issues here as anywhere, I think as a whole we have less widespread climate change denial, and a very different culture around hunting / shooting etc. But I think sometimes because of that, there can be less of a drive to protection and less awareness of the damage being done by some practices and ways of living. To think about what is affecting owl populations in the US, for example, you might be thinking about industrial-scale logging across a whole state, where I might be thinking about a single person cutting down all the trees in their garden to treble the size of their holiday home. But I’m also thinking about use of pesticides across the whole nation, cultures of night-time lighting on homes and businesses, development and planning laws, wildlife protection laws. Whatever the scale, the same principles are behind it. And maybe similar actions: find like-minded people, be specific about what you want to achieve, approach individuals even if within a corporation or state legislature. Get people working with you where you can. If not, be willing to get people to work with you to protect those environments. I recently did a short course with Organising For Power, and I highly recommend it for anyone who is thinking about organising for change, in any area. 

TS: You mention your struggle with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome in your piece. Do you feel like working on this project has helped you better adjust to your illness or perhaps see things in a new light? 

PA : It made me realise how much I can do, if I do it in my own time. I always thought I couldn’t be one of those people who observed wild creatures in their own habitats, because it’s so inaccessible to me in general, but the luck and wonder of proximity here made it possible, and opened up other similar possibilities for me. What can I do and see and learn in small chunks close to my own home? Thinking about those shared qualities with owls did also help me reframe some of the things I’ve found most difficult about my condition in my own head too. There’s a lot to be said for feeling less lonely in your pain, however you can achieve that.

TS : We, as readers, have come on this journey with you and the many owls we meet. What do you hope your readers take away from your experiences with them? 

PA : I hope readers will go away from the book with a new or deepened appreciation for owls in particular, but I also hope they’ll turn to the world around them with renewed attention – to everything and everyone that lives alongside them – human and nonhuman. I hope they will turn to their local environment with love and care, and find that reflected back at them too. I hope when they’re awake in the night they’ll know they’re not alone, and that there’s nothing wrong with being a peculiar bird. I hope they’ll find joy and beauty in all of it. 

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Tyler is a SUNY Oswego Alumni with a BA in Creative Writing. They write drama, thrillers, and dark romance, many of which focus on LGBTQ+ diversity and representation. They have five Miniature Dachshunds, and can often be found writing, reading, or drawing.