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With To See an Owl, Caldecott Medalist Matthew Cordell turns a personal hobby — birding — into a picture book about all the Ps: perseverance, preoccupation, pursuit, passion.

Roger Sutton: You live in exurban Chicago. Is that where you find your owls?

Matthew Cordell: Yeah, I go to forest preserves all around the area. I have traveled an hour and a half to see owls, but I try to find owl territories that are close by so I can visit them several times a week.

RS: One thing I really love about the book is it's all about perseverance. Just going back and going back and going back.

MC: The main character of course is a child, but it's really based on my experience as an adult trying to find my first owl and not really knowing anything about it.

RS: What prompted it?

MC: I started birding maybe a year before the pandemic. I was always going out for walks in forest preserves, but I didn't really notice birds. Until one morning, I was on one of my daily walks and I happened to look up and saw a bald eagle soaring overhead. I was just gobsmacked. “Whoa, I didn't even know we had eagles here!” I had no idea. I started really paying attention to birds after that. After a few years I realized the one bird I’d never seen was an owl, and that's because they're so difficult to find. During the day, they hide really well. They're very well camouflaged. They're very quiet. They sleep in a lot of coverage — dense trees, evergreen trees. I looked for owls during the day for a long time and then I realized I was going to have to change it up and start looking at night and pre-dawn. I started hanging out with other birders, which the book touches on too. Janie, the main character, is having the hardest time trying to find an owl, no matter how much study and research she does. But it's not until she sits down with another birder, her teacher, and picks his brain that she formulates a more methodical approach. That's kind of what I did. I befriended a birder who became a mentor to me. One night during a full moon we were walking down a trail, and very silently this great horned owl flew up onto a treetop and perched there. It sat there probably twenty minutes. We were really close to it. It was such a magical experience. We watched it and tried to get some pictures of it with the full moon right behind it. It was such a big moment for me. Seeing an owl for the first time with a friend and also just that magic of the full moon and being in the darkness and experiencing it like that was something I'll never forget.

Photo courtesy of Matthew Cordell.

RS: One of the signature moments of my life was about thirty years ago. Richard and I went on a trip to Australia, and we were in Queensland out in the rainforest. We wanted to go out with one particular trail guide, but the only trip he had available was with a couple of bird watchers, a mother and daughter who traveled all over the world filling up their bird book. We didn't care about birds, we just wanted to see the rainforest. But we decided to go, and what I discovered was having a focus made the walk so much richer. Having a focus made the whole place become more alive to us. Does that make sense?

MC: Yeah, absolutely. Part of the joy in it for me is the search. When I was a kid, I used to love to look for four-leaf clovers.

RS: I still look for four-leaf clovers. I always think, If I just look for five more minutes, I'll find one.

MC: It's almost meditative. Other kids would be playing football or whatever and I’m sitting in the grass looking through weeds, essentially, for one that has four leaves. It always felt really special to find one, but I realized pretty quickly that it wasn't special to everyone. I would bring one inside and show it to my dad and he'd be like, "Oh, okay, cool." But I loved it. I loved that basically it's almost like looking for a needle in a haystack. It feels almost impossible but there's something really calming about being by yourself, or maybe with one or two other people, and just focusing on that one thing so that you're forced to tune everything out, all the outside elements. I loved that when I was a kid, and that's kind of the same feeling I get when I'm birding. I know when I go out that there's a chance I'm not going to see the things I want to see, but that's okay too. I mean, it's disappointing, but it's like, “At least I went out and I tried,” and that feels good no matter what. But to see a bird, especially an owl, it's such a reward every time for me. It doesn't matter how many times I've seen even sometimes the same owl, I just love observing them and seeing all the different things they do at different times of the year. It gives me goosebumps every time I find one. I keep waiting for that sheen to come off and it doesn't.

RS: How do you deal with the feeling that there very well could be an owl right behind you, but you didn't happen to look in the right direction at the right time?

MC: It is really frustrating sometimes, and the fact is I always have something else I have to do by the end of those walks. I have to get home and make dinner, or I have to pick up my son from drama class — there's always something important that is waiting. So there's this period of time where I'm just searching and searching and listening and listening and I don't want to leave if I can't find anything. I've been a bit late picking up my son from his class a few times. And he knows what I was doing.

RS: Is it just owls?

MC: Almost always. I do bird in general, but the thing I most obsess over are owls and different species of owls. And when I do see owls, sometimes it happens in just the blink of an eye. Like it'll just fly up to this tree and perch on a branch preening for about thirty seconds and then it flies off and hides somewhere else and I know what a blessing it was for me to have looked in that spot at just the right time. If I had just walked past a minute later or earlier, I would have never been given that moment. It is such a reward when you land in the right spot. But it’s also very frustrating when you have to leave, and you haven’t seen anything. That frustration never goes away either, even though you prepare yourself for it every time you go out. It still stings a bit.

RS: If you found them too easily, you wouldn’t be looking.

MC: Exactly. If I saw the birds that I wanted to see every visit, it wouldn’t be as exciting. And that’s one of the things, too, about birding and owls is that you don't always get what you want and that's very much like most things in life. It's a good way to stay centered. You set yourself up for reward and disappointment and have that happen over and over.

RS: And keep coming back for more.

MC: Yeah.

RS: I thought you did such a nice job of conveying the value of the search. Like, this is not a book about how to look for an owl even though there is some information in the book. I know now to look for whitewash on the ground or on branches. And for pellets. But what you achieved here was showing what it's like to have that passion. What prompted you to go from experience to book? What was it about looking for owls that made you want to turn it into a picture book?

MC: Well, it is an obsession for sure. I do it only three or four times a week, but it's a big thing in my life. The difference between this book and Wolf in the Snow is I wasn't really looking at wolves before I did that book. But with this one, I've been birding for years and also posting lots of stuff on social media. And one day I got a message from Lee Wade, my editor. Whom I knew, but we hadn't actually worked together on a book before, and she mentioned she was intrigued by my owl photos and the things I was posting. I would make little comics about me out looking for owls and the frustration of owls. Lee said she was also fascinated by owls and wanted someone to do an owl book with. And I was like, “This is the perfect message in my inbox,” because it gave me the spark that I needed to actually do it. As creators, we think about things a lot, but we don't always pull the trigger because we’re busy with existing projects. Lee’s message was what I needed to make this happen. I wanted to make a book about the first time I saw an owl. And I wanted to make a book about not being able to see an owl, because that’s such an important part of it. It’s such a mystery in many ways, especially for a baby birder, as I call myself. I’ve really only been doing it for about five or six years. And when you don’t know anything and you’re just picking up pieces along the way, it takes a long time. It has to be something that you really want, otherwise you’ll just give up on it. I think it goes back to the four-leaf clover thing. I never wanted to give up on it, you know? I just kept doing it. And I hate getting up early. I'm not a morning person, but for weeks I would wake up brutally early before the sun came up and go for walks, when nobody else was out on the trail. I never particularly liked to walk at night, either. I'm kind of afraid of the dark. I don't like not being able to see and it scares me a little bit when I hear noises. I get spooked. So I didn't want to do these things, but I did. What I wanted to write about was that period of time and try to touch on why I liked owls so much, in the story. I would draw owls all the time before I saw them and just sort of fantasize: “Maybe one day I'll see this great horned owl, so I'm going to draw a great horned owl.” I kind of drew it into existence, like Janie herself in the book.

RS: Well, she certainly perseveres. She's got that glorious map that you included of all the places that she's looked, and she'll go out in any weather. It really made me want to try it because it felt like even when she didn't succeed, it was worth it. And when she does succeed, you give us that wonderful page turn! To the double-page spread of the owl noises before we actually see the owl. I'm guessing that's our clue, that's how she recognized it, when she heard the call. That’s when she knew to look — it’s here somewhere.

MC: Exactly. The calls are usually the thing you experience first. If you're lucky, you see them, but it's such a good tell to be able to hear them first because, as I said, they could be anywhere and they could be very well hidden, and in the dark it makes it even more difficult. At that point, too, Janie hadn't heard any owls call, either, so it was all a new experience for her. I remember the first time I heard an owl call. It really captures your attention and it's usually at night or early in the morning. They don't want to make themselves known in daylight unless something's wrong. But yeah, she gets the full experience at the end of the story. She hears the call and then in that page-turn it’s all sort of a slow reveal. She hears the owl first and then you turn the page again and finally it's there. Like I said, it never gets old for me.

RS: I think you're very respectful of both the owl and Janie where her reaction is magic, which is I think the last word of the book, isn't it?

MC: Yeah, “magic.”

RS: But there's no bushwa about how she felt the owls calling her name. There’s no mysticism laid on to the story or the science. One thing I've learned as a reviewer is that a lot of times a book succeeds because of what it doesn’t do, not because of what it does.

MC: I like that.

RS: You were so contained in portraying Janie's experience. You didn’t go into her head too much. You gave the reader room to sort of become Janie for themselves.

MC: I tried to be somewhat restrained with it. As a writer and an illustrator, I’m conscious of that synergy in picture books that doesn't exist anywhere else. If you pull out some writing, then you can fill in that storytelling with imagery, and vice versa. But I never want to be too descriptive. I feel like it’s respectful of your reader to let them do some of that work on their own as they’re reading the book.

RS: The variety in the page design is wonderful. Is that something you do, or is that something Lee does? How does that work?

MC: Lee is a fantastic art director. It was so wonderful to work with her, and she definitely has an eye. She made some suggestions all throughout the process. But I do love to vary spread to spread — close-ups and then far-away and overhead views.

RS: I love the spread with three banners of action.

MC: A lot of those decisions are made in the sketches. My first sketch dummy was very dense. There's this one spread early on where there's a lot of Janie’s drawings and we see some photos of her and her mom and we see her drawing, and that's what I did a lot of throughout the first dummy. What Lee gave to me was saying, “Just pull back a little bit because you don't want to overcrowd the spreads.” She was able to help me distill and to not overdo it. Because the thing is that I was just so excited to be able to draw owls.

RS: “Hey, Lee, can I have a pop-up?”

MC: Right. And she tamed me, which was such a good call. I love collaboration in those ways — being able to try a lot of things in the beginning and show it to a collaborator and then figure out from another set of eyes what's working and what's not working. So it was a great collaboration. I really enjoyed it.

RS: I think that the energy of the book is maintained because of that variety, where you might have two pictures on a spread, you might have a collage of images on the spread, you’ll have a double-page spread all one picture, and those three panels that I love so much. That's part of the suspense of turning the page. It's not just what's going to happen on the next page but: what is that next page going to look like, how is it going to continue the story?

MC: That's great, I love to hear that.

RS: This book is entirely created in pen and watercolor, is that right?

MC: Yep.

RS: Do you think you could do this digitally?

MC: You know, I just don’t get the satisfaction I need from digital art. After doing all this drawing, after doing all this painting, I have to have a physical document on my drawing table that I can hold, that I can look at. And not only that, I don’t like how you can endlessly undo things digitally. It’s sort of a love/hate thing in terms of making mistakes, fixing mistakes, and sometimes you never really fix it fully but it’s always there. That just doesn’t exist digitally. And it makes me more connected to the thing that I made because it gives me a sense of history about it. Another thing is I just love art supplies. I love pens. I love paper. I love holding the paper as I'm drawing on it. I love a messy desk of pens and inks and watercolor. It's all too special to me to throw it all in a closet somewhere and just work on a screen and draw on a piece of glass. I'll never do that. I totally get why people do it and I totally get that other people can get the satisfaction they need from it, but it doesn't do it for me.

RS: Is it hard to draw from a bird’s-eye perspective? That one picture of Janie as seen from high in the tree, just behind the owls, is really something.

MC: In the case of that particular picture, it was something I had to imagine and something I had to kind of Frankenstein together because I would never be in that position. I would never be up in that tree, and I certainly would never be that close behind two great horned owls! So I had to do a lot of research looking for images of the backs of these birds’ heads. Google Images gives me maybe ten or twenty images, and I put them together. But this is the kind of stuff we have to do to get that picture. That's the beauty, in a way, of the modern world. We don't have to actually climb the tree, which is important for someone who's forty-nine years old. I don't want to climb trees anymore. If I fall, I'll be in trouble.

RS: How long had you been looking before you saw your first owl?

MC: Probably about six months. A lot of that was just me fumbling around looking in places and times of day I had zero chance of finding an owl. And then I started to figure it out. Technology has been an amazing tool for birding. There’s an app called eBird where people post their birding data from all around the world. Someone will post a little pin that says they saw a great horned owl here on such and such date, or they saw a barred owl in this forest preserve on such and such date. So you can at least find an area where they might be. All of those things came together, but it took months and months of failure and disappointment. And it was so very worth it.

RS: Couldn’t stop.

MC: Yeah, couldn't stop and haven't stopped.

RS: I think Janie would be proud of you.

MC: I hope so. One of my very favorite picture books is Owl Moon by Jane Yolen. It's a perfect book even if you don't like owls, even if you have no connection to owls. I've never met Jane Yolen, never even talked to her, but I named Janie after her.

RS: I’ll tell her.

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