Jonathan C. Slaght had seen just one rare Blakiston's fish owl in his life — and that one completely by chance — before rashly deciding that he would spend five years studying the elusive bird.
In 2005, Slaght had earned a master's degree from the University of Minnesota, tracking the effect of logging on songbirds in the remote Primorye region of far Eastern Russia. Slaght, who had also spent time in Primorye as a Peace Corps volunteer, hoped to return there for his doctoral research.
For his doctorate, he was torn between studying hooded cranes, and fish owls. It was the terrain, really, that was the decider. Larch bogs — crane habitat — were hot and buggy.
Fish owls, on the other hand, lived along rivers that cut through dense forests where Amur tigers and Asiatic black bears also lived. Much better! Fish owls it was. All he had to do now was, well, find them.
"Owls of the Eastern Ice," Slaght's narrative of the five winters he spent in Primorye, is an absolute marvel of a book. Part science narrative, part memoir, part adventure story, it is captivating, thrilling and beautifully written.
The largest owl in the world, the Blakiston's fish owl is both rare and endangered. It is the size, he notes, of a fire hydrant. With its small head and football body, it looks, Slaght writes, "too comical to be a real bird, as if someone had hastily glued fistfuls of feathers to a yearling bear."
He describes the owl as "a defiant, floppy goblin" and, later, says that a pair looks like "feathered golems." A juvenile fish owl is "a small gray sack of potatoes." Clearly, Slaght is very fond of these strange birds.
The time to study the nesting habits of these owls is in late winter and early spring, and so, equipped with bulky old Soviet snowmobiles, cross-country skis and snowshoes, Slaght and Russians Tolya Ryzhov and Sergei Avdeyuk headed into the wilderness.
