Juliana Barnes, a nun who wrote from an English convent, buried a list of animal collective nouns inside her 1486 Book of Saint Albans — an exaltation of larks, a murmuration of starlings, an unkindness of ravens, still in use today. Half a millennium after her death, English illustrator Brian Wildsmith painted the loveliest of them for his 1967 picture book Birds, rendering owls not as a parliament but by an older, stranger term: a stare.