Book Review: Owls of the Eastern Ice

 Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl

Slaght, Johnathan. (2020: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 348pp.)

Blackiston’s fish owl is the world’s biggest and rarest owl. It has a wingspan approaching two meters and a fluffy, shaggy appearance Slaght likens to a juvenile bear with feathers glued on.  It’s scattered in pockets of Russia, China, and Japan, huddling in sections of old-growth forest with large nesting trees and streams or rivers that don’t freeze over.  The total population is perhaps 2,000.

In Russia, where the species was only found to exist in 1971, it clusters along the Pacific coast.  That’s where Slaght, the son of diplomats and a good speaker of Russian, joined a Russian scientist to find the owls, document locations, and attach GPS tags to as many as possible.

This is a book about five years of hard work in unforgiving terrain where humans keep an eye out for the Amur tiger, the huge brown bear, and the armed and dangerous poacher. Slaght works with a rotating cast including Sergey Surmach of the Federal Scientific Center of the East Asian Terrestrial Biodiversity and Sergey Avedeuk of the Amur-Ussuri Center for Avian Diversity (love the names). They set out using snowmobiles and a massive ex-military four-wheel truck into areas where roads don’t exist and a Western scientist is a sight rarer than the owl.  Here in Russia’s Primorsky Krai (Maritime Territory), they also face dangers from the land itself: fires in summer and freezing in the infamous Russian winters.  They have many failures before devising a trap that works for the wily birds. Equipment fails in the harsh conditions, and Slaght describes their efforts to fashion fixes or alternatives.

He writes, too, of the emotional heights and valleys inherent in chasing something that may be vanishing. Slaght is an excellent writer, and people, owls, and the terrain all come alive in his words.

Much of the owl habitat is being logged, and regulations and enforcement are spotty in this remote area. Deciding that a large wildlife preserve is politically difficult and would affect many people’s livelihoods, Slaght focuses instead on pinpointing the owls’ locations and habitat needs to pursue more focused protection. He negotiates with companies and officials about leaving certain trees and areas alone, and scores some successes. At the end of the book, he is cautiously optimistic.  Slaght, a man who puts his life where his heart is, continues his work today with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Russia program.

 Field work is often regular repetition of challenging or unpleasant activities, an application of persistent pressure to a question until the answer finally emerges. – John Slaght, Owls of the Eastern Ice