Carl Safina’s account of how he and his family adopted a screech owl, named her Alfie and raised her to adulthood is, on one level, the story of human beings thrown in close contact with a familiar but wild animal. He digs much deeper, however, than Sterling North did for raccoons in “Rascal” and Margarete Sigl Corbo did for backyard birds in “Arnie, the Darling Starling.” You can imagine Safina driving around with one of those “Who rescued who?” bumper stickers, but with his showing a silhouette of an owl instead of a dog or cat.
 
 
Yet “Alfie and Me” is more than that. Safina is determined to turn this experience into a window on humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature. Reading it sent me back to William Blake’s poem “Auguries of Innocence.” Like Blake, Safina sees the world in a grain of sand, holds infinity in the palm of his hand. In addition to Blake’s poetic insight, Safina brings agreat deal of scientific knowledge to his work; he is a renowned ecologist, the author of numerous acclaimed books and a MacArthur fellow.