May 12, 1921

Farley Mowat (May 12, 1921 to May 6, 2014) was a writer about, and defender of, the wilderness. His book Never Cry Wolf (1963) was just the most famous of many books. Never Cry Wolf was said to have altered the public's view of that species. Here is what Google Books has to say about this author:

Farley Mowat was born in Belleville, Ontario, in 1921, and grew up in Belleville, Trenton, Windsor, Saskatoon, Toronto, and Richmond Hill. He served in World War II from 1940 until 1945, entering the army as a private and emerging with the rank of captain. He began writing for his living in 1949 after spending two years in the Arctic. Since 1949 he has lived in or visited almost every part of Canada and many other lands, including the distant regions of Siberia. He remains an inveterate traveller with a passion for remote places and peoples. He has twenty-five books to his name, which have been published in translations in over twenty languages in more than sixty countries. They include such internationally known works as People of the Deer, The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, Never Cry Wolf, Westviking, The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float, Sibir, A Whale for the Killing, The Snow Walker, And No Birds Sang, and Virunga: The Passion of Dian Fossey. His short stories and articles have appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Maclean’s, Atlantic Monthly and other magazines.

One of his books, Owls in the Family (1961) was about a boy free to explore the Saskatchewan wilderness, about his pets and especially his pet owls. This describes Mowat's own boyhood, and this book is probably greatly about his own real pet owls. Here is an example of his clear prose:

Wol [one of the owls] wasn't in the tree. In fact there was no sign of him anywhere in the front yard. I raced around the corner to the back, expecting to find him dead and eaten. Instead I found him asleep on the back porch steps. He had his feathers ruffled out the way birds do when they are asleep, and it wasn't until I got right up to him that I saw the cat.

Wol was sitting on it and only its head and tail stuck out beneath his feathers, but I could see that this cat wasn't going to bother anybody anymore.... 

It was a big ginger tom that lived two doors down the street and belonged to a big man who didn't like kids. This cat had been the terror of birds, other cats, and even the dogs...I got a shovel and buried it in the back of the garden.