Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Have you ever wondered what it’s like – really like – to be a field biologist? Searching for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, maybe, or tracking rare leopards or tigers, or peering at birds of paradise performing their dazzling displays? Jonathan Slaght, a Russophile from Minnesota gets to follow his passion: roaming the remote forests of easternmost Russia. By sheer happenstance, he spots an owl that had not been photographed in that region in a hundred years – a Blakiston’s fish owl, a “defiant, floppy goblin” that looks like someone “glued fistfuls of feathers to a yearling bear and propped [it] in a tree.” And the hunt is on. Wow, you say. How cool, you say.
Slaght is here to tell you it is cold. Bitterly, relentlessly, bitingly cold. And wet. He wades in streams through slush up to his waist. He and his team live in the back of a truck for weeks at a time. Or tents. One of them talks incessantly, and snores volcanically. They hole up in an isolated cabin inhabited by a hermit, ostensibly on the run from the KGB, who explains about the goblins who tickle his feet at night. They are nearly stranded as a logging crew starts to bulldoze over the road. Gasoline, cigarettes, and tempers run short. The ethanol does not seem to. The residents of the region build houses out of scrap, poach and fish and hunt without limits, and the men seem to function mostly on alcohol. Slaght spent two years with the Peace Corps in this area – it would be interesting to know more about what he did there.
But those owls… huge, shaggy, wary, glorious creatures. Slaght slogs through swamps, frozen rivers, blizzards, and tangled thorns, and is rewarded by a distant hoot here and a distinctive clawprint in the snow there. He measures and counts trees, he identifies every plant he can find, he snorkels kilometers of streams and counts the fish: do the owls need these? Why? The equipment freezes. The owls pry off their transmitters or break the traps. As he and two colleagues struggle to examine one ferocious female in the back of the truck one night, she bites, kicks, breaks away, and immediately smashes the lone light bulb, leaving the three men and one really enormous, pissed off owl loose in the pitch darkness of a truck camper.
Through it all, Slaght is methodical, dedicated beyond belief, serious, and he just keeps going. And the man can write when his editor(s) let him: he describes the Tengmalm’s (aka Boreal) Owl “with its chocolate-brown plumage, and a large, flat-topped head strewn with tears of silver, [it] recalls a severe-looking cupcake.” On a rare summer visit, he mentions the “Pallas’s leaf warblers, sounding like crazed machine gunners… [spraying] volleys of sharp trills across the valley.” He seems almost unnaturally calm – perhaps it’s his lock on serious-scientist mode. Surely, the first time he cradled a trapped fish owl in his arms, was there not some sense of awe, of wonder, of splendor in his heart? He doesn’t share it. He likes and respects all his colleagues, but their months of shared endeavor don’t seem to foster much closeness. Or perhaps he is just being careful of their privacy, to his credit. They take what comes with ingenuity, humor, and unsurpassable fortitude.
This is a marvelously-written chronicle of the hard, hard, boring work of understanding wild creatures, wild places, strange landscapes, communities, and people (almost entirely men). Slaght is clearly a driven, devoted individual. And it’s a challenge to write a book about a lot of endless, frustrating, detailed work that is this much fun to read. The owls are lucky to have him on their side, and we are lucky to have him tell us about them. There is more information on his project at http://www.fishowls.com/, and an opportunity to support the work. I did.
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