Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan C. Slaght

The book was on the longlist for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction. His experiences tracking Blakiston’s Fish Owl in Russia, Owls of the Eastern Ice, was published in August 2020 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. He translated Vladimir Arsenyev’s 1921 natural history classic, Across the Ussuri Kray (Indiana University Press, 2016), and he authors a blog for Scientific American about his fieldwork titled East of Siberia. Slaght’s writings, scientific research, and photographs have been featured by the BBC World Service, The New York Times, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, The New Yorker, and Audubon Magazine, among others. Slaght, is the Russia and Northeast Asia Coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), managing research projects that involve endangered species and coordinating WCS avian conservation activities along the East Asia-Australasian Flyway from the Arctic to the tropics. At the heart of Slaght's story are the fish owls themselves: cunning hunters, devoted parents, singers of eerie duets, and survivors in a harsh and shrinking habitat.Jonathan C. It is an absorbing account, richly detailed and gracefully written with humor and empathy. With this book, Slaght takes us with him to the wild and remote forests of the Russian Far East on a quest to track and study Blakiston’s fish owls. This quest sends them on all-night monitoring missions in freezing tents, mad dashes across thawing rivers, and free-climbs up rotting trees to check nests for precious eggs. Slaght, the world’s largest owls were mythic, seldom-seen forest phantoms. And so, as Slaght and his devoted team set out to locate the owls, they aim to craft a conservation plan that helps ensure the species' survival. They are easiest to find in winter, when their tracks mark the snowy banks of the rivers where they feed. Despite a wingspan of six feet and a height of over two feet, the Blakiston's fish owl is highly elusive. That first sighting set his calling as a scientist. Soon he was on a five-year journey, searching for this enormous, enigmatic creature in the lush, remote forests of eastern Russia.

He snapped a quick photo and shared it with experts. Bigger than any owl he knew, it looked like a small bear with decorative feathers. Slaght had a chance encounter with one of the most mysterious birds on Earth. A field scientist and conservationist tracks the elusive Blakiston's Fish Owl in the forbidding reaches of eastern Russia When he was just a fledgling birdwatcher, Jonathan C.

Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan C. Slaght