‘Owls of the Eastern Ice’ Review: The Salmon Eaters
An owl the size of an eagle, the fish owl seems ‘almost too big and too comical to be a real bird,’ according to one expert. Fewer than 2,000 survive today, many in Russia’s Primorye province, a remote forested region bordering North Korea and China.
Image: Jonathan Slaght with a Blakiston’s fish owl.
Jonathan Slaght’s first encounter with Blakiston’s fish owl, the rare salmon-eating raptor that would become the focus of his doctoral thesis and this book, was accidental. On a hike in 2000, when he was stationed with the Peace Corps in Russia’s Far East, he “unexpectedly flushed an enormous and panicked bird.” His description of the eventual object of his obsession alerts us that this is no ordinary owl, and Mr. Slaght is no ordinary writer:
“This disheveled mass of wood-chip brown regarded us warily with electric-yellow eyes. We were uncertain at first which bird, actually, we’d come across. It was clearly an owl, but bigger than any I’d seen, about the size of an eagle but fluffier and more portly, with enormous ear tufts. Backlit by the hazy gray of a winter sky, it seemed almost too big and too comical to be a real bird, as if someone had hastily glued fistfuls of feathers to a yearling bear, then propped the dazed beast in the tree.”
OWLS OF THE EASTERN ICE
By Jonathan C. Slaght
FSG, 348 pages, $28
Before he fell in love with fish owls, Mr. Slaght fell in love with one of their prime territories—Russia’s Primorye province, a remote, forested region bordering North Korea and China on its south and west, and the Sea of Japan to its east. His first visit was in 1995, on a business trip with his father, who was stationed in Moscow with the U.S. Commercial Service. Through college, graduate school and beyond, Mr. Slaght has been drawn back repeatedly to this “coastal talon of land” like a fish owl to salmon. Fluent in Russian, he feels at home there.
“Owls of the Eastern Ice” is a vivid account of the author’s extensive ornithological fieldwork for his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Minnesota—20 months of physically demanding expeditions to Primorye spread over five icy winters (and one summer) between 2006 and 2010. His goal was to research the habitats, behavior and exigencies of these elusive, endangered mega-owls in order to develop a viable conservation plan that would take into account the needs of both the fish owls and the people—loggers and fishermen—who depend on the same resources.
Mr. Slaght’s book is a stellar example of the fruitful intersection of scientific inquiry, conservation advocacy and wilderness adventure. It belongs to a rare species of nature writing in which facts are delivered with both exactitude and storytelling panache. Consummate practitioners include John McPhee and Helen Macdonald.
“Owls” is replete with the narrative excitements of serious stakes, daunting challenges and disappointing setbacks, from blizzards, roadblocks and frigid nocturnal vigils on icy riverbanks to technological failures, dangerously thin spring ice, and an exhausting, overly loquacious field assistant. But it is also leavened by humorous profiles of Mr. Slaght’s changing crew of roving researchers and the eccentric, heavy-drinking fishermen, hunters, loggers, hermits and outlaws they meet.
Although much of his fieldwork involves long nights tracking fish owls by their hooted duets and K-shaped footprints in the snow, Mr. Slaght is no fly-by-night reporter. His carefully planned three-stage, five-year project—reconnaissance, trapping, monitoring and interpreting data—shows him to be a patient, determined researcher.
In fact, Mr. Slaght has become one of the world’s foremost experts in fish owls. A Google search brings up a striking photo of the bearded author, gazing as sternly as the sharply beaked, yellow-eyed bundle of shaggy feathers he clasps in his crossed arms, which are shielded in protective leather gauntlets. It also yields information oddly missing from this otherwise wonderful book: the fish owl’s scientific name, Bubo blakistoni, a tribute to English naturalist Thomas Blakiston, who collected an early specimen on Hokkaido, Japan, in 1883.
“Owls” offers numerous pleasures besides its winning portrait of this rare creature—of which Mr. Slaght estimates the global population at fewer than 2,000, with 186 pairs in Primorye. His enthusiastic reporting encompasses both the local color and the colorful locals. Among the former are numerous bird species sightings, including male Mandarin ducks, white-tailed and Steller’s sea eagles, a Eurasian three-toed woodpecker, scaly-sided mergansers, and a tiny, flat-topped Tengmalm’s owl, which he likens to “a severe-looking cupcake.”
As for the colorful locals, many generously host Mr. Slaght in their rustic cabins when he and his team aren’t staying in their camper. Everyone has a story, frequently loosened by voluminous amounts of ethanol vodka—which is sold in massive jugs with thin, easy-to-puncture seals, since once opened, a bottle is meant to be drunk until empty.
At the relatively cushy lodgings of a caretaker employed by a sausage magnate, the author discovers a shed with rows of drying red-deer penises. He’s told that his host soaks them in alcohol to produce a concoction he believes boosts virility. Near the Tunsha River, the crew find shelter with a hermit who’s been living alone for a decade, perhaps evading the law in a cabin that had been part of a hydroelectric station during World War II and was used as a Soviet youth camp until the late 1980s.
Mr. Slaght’s driving concern is to save fish owls before it is too late. To monitor their nesting and feeding behavior, specimens from multiple river sites need to be trapped, tagged and equipped with lipstick-sized backpack transmitters or expensive GPS data loggers—which is often an exercise in frustration.
Encouragingly, some of Mr. Slaght’s findings have swayed logging companies to refrain from harvesting the rotting tall poplars and elms in which fish owls nest, and to close off roads to salmon poachers to protect the birds’ primary food source.
Unfortunately, other things are less easy to control, like the 2016 Lionrock typhoon that devastated 1,600 square kilometers of key forest habitat. Also beyond Mr. Slaght’s control is the availability of jobs in his area of expertise. His postdoctoral day job with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Russia Program keeps him in the region, but it involves Primorye’s endangered Amur tigers and leopards rather than his beloved fish owls. Even so, readers will be happy to learn that this gifted naturalist continues to moonlight as an avian conservationist, and has expanded his purview into Asia.
—Ms. McAlpin reviews books regularly for the Journal, the Washington Post and NPR.org.
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