Although each of Owliver's parents has ideas for what he should do when he grows up and they expose him to lessons and experiences of various kinds, Owliver makes his own decision about what he is going to be.
While his mother is away finding food, a newborn owl falls out of his nest and anxiously tries to find her, receiving help from various forest animals.
The inhabitants of a small northern Canadian village consider Jake a lazy old man but when their town is overrun with owls only Jake knows how to scatter the birds.
When Soren, a barn owl, arrives at St. Aggie's, a school for orphaned owls, he suspects trouble and with his new friend, a clever elf owl named Gylfie, embarks on a perilous journey to save all owls from the danger at St. Aggie's.
A riddle asking the reader to guess which animal is being described precedes information about different parts of a barn owl's body, how it behaves, and where it lives.