The Little Owl is native to continental Europe, North Africa, and western and central Asia, where it lives in open country with old trees, farmland, olive groves, and ruins. It is partly diurnal, and in classical Greece it was the bird of Athena, appearing on the silver coinage of Athens; hence its scientific name. Wolf could have studied it in the Rhineland of his youth, in the Netherlands, and in the captive birds kept in London.

When Gould published this plate, the Little Owl was not a British bird. It appeared only as a scarce and much-doubted vagrant to the southern counties, and Charles Waterton’s attempt to establish five birds brought from Rome at Walton Hall in Yorkshire in 1843 had failed. Gould accordingly wrote of it as a continental species whose British claims required scrutiny: “If this little Owl were indigenous to Britain instead of an accidental visitor, it would doubtless be a general favourite, for its economy is interesting, and its manners somewhat singular.”

The bird owes its present place in the English countryside to two landowners. Edmund Meade-Waldo released some forty owls at Stonewall Park in Kent between 1874 and 1880, where a pair bred in 1879; and Lord Lilford, this drawing’s first owner, bought owls in the London market and released them at Lilford Hall in Northamptonshire over many years. In 1889 one of his keepers found a Little Owl sitting in a hollow ash in the deer park, and the pair “brought off four young birds in the second week of June.” For a time the species was known in the Midlands as “Lilford’s owl,” and from these introductions it spread across most of England and Wales within fifty years. That a drawing of the species passed through Lilford’s hands gives it an unusual double interest, ornithological as well as artistic.

Few images in Victorian bird art hold the eye as directly as this one. The adult owl faces the viewer squarely, drawn to life size, its lemon-yellow irises set in a broad facial disc that Wolf has built up from thousands of fine hair strokes. It perches on a lichen-crusted bough at the mouth of a hollow trunk, one foot clamped over a freshly caught field vole. Behind and below, two nearly fledged owlets press together in the darkness of the nest hole, their gaze fixed on the same point as the adult’s. Ivy climbs the left of the composition, and at lower left a wren, worked more summarily, peers out from the leaves. The background is a wash of pale blue and gray, fading into untouched paper at every edge.

Wolf composed his subjects as episodes rather than specimens, and here he catches a domestic moment in the life of a hunting bird: the prey delivered, the young alert, the parent watchful. The three sets of eyes form a triangle that draws the viewer into the sheet. Technically the drawing is a fine demonstration of Wolf’s method with crisp graphite underdrawing visible at the contours of the bough and the ivy stems; watercolor is laid in thin washes, with the barred and spotted plumage stippled feather by feather in drier pigment; opaque bodycolor supplies the white spots of the breast and the highlights along the scapulars; and gum arabic is brushed over the eyes and the darkest passages of the wing to give them a wet, saturated depth. The vole is handled with equal care, its fur described in short directional strokes.

Gould conceived the plates of The Birds of Great Britain, supplied specimens and notes, and sometimes a rough sketch, but the finished design was the artist’s. Wolf’s drawings were then redrawn on stone, usually by Henry Constantine Richter or William Hart, printed, and colored by hand following a pattern plate approved by Gould. Sheets like this, in which the artist resolved the whole composition, occupy the pivotal place in that process. The pencil note “1.37” in the lower margin matches the plate’s position in the first volume of The Birds of Great Britain. Wolf worked freelance, kept his own studio, and made no secret of his reservations about Gould’s commercial instincts; Gould, for his part, considered him indispensable and reserved the raptors and owls for him whenever he could. Original Wolf drawings for Gould are held in quantity by only a handful of institutions, notably the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas.

Gould’s letterpress closes by describing this composition and naming the prey:

The Plate represents the bird, of the natural size, with the nearly fledged young, from a drawing by Mr. Wolf. The little quadruped is the Short-tailed Field Mouse (Arvicola agrestis).

The “Short-tailed Field Mouse” is the field vole, now Microtus agrestis, the staple prey of the species across much of its range. Gould also noted the trade that complicated the British record: “specimens in the flesh are frequently sent to the London markets, and I fear often palmed upon our collectors as British killed.”