Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght *** (of 4)

 

A fish owl stands as tall as your chest. It plucks salmon with its talons from roaring rivers in the Russian province of Primorye, in the far east of the country. And before Jonathan Slaght started his PhD and wrote this book, not much more was known about the owls.

The book is one-third scientific investigation, one-third description of a climate of winter blizzards that rage with such intensity and duration that transportation by any means is impossible, and one-third conversations with the people of the forest: hermits, indigenous, old Soviet castaways, and vodka-fueled nutcases. While I suspect Slaght's interests run in order from bird conservation to the weather that gets in his way, and finally the people with whom he must work to observe his birds, far and away the most interesting descriptions are of people living so very far from globalization. The book probably is more engaging for readers who know little about how ecologists work. For me, the long efforts to build successful bird-traps and attach reliable tracking devices was a little too close to the kind of work I see every day. Tedious.