Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)
Jonathan Slaght’s description of his first run-in with a Blakiston’s fish owl “alerts us that this is no ordinary owl, and Slaght is no ordinary writer,” said Heller McAlpin in The Wall Street Journal. The young biologist was hiking in Russia’s Far East when he accidentally flushed an owl larger and stranger than any he’d seen. “This disheveled mass of wood-chip brown regarded us warily with electric-yellow eyes,” he writes. “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.” For the next five winters, Slaght returned to study the endangered creature, and his account of that work “belongs to a rare species of nature writing in which facts are delivered with both exactitude and storytelling panache.”
The story combines “cliff-hangers and drama, careful scientific observation, and a dash of humor,” said Laurie Hertzel in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Slaght and two colleagues aimed to tag a few owls, then devise a conservation plan. But nothing was easy. The mountainous Primorsky Krai region features subzero temperatures and sudden blizzards. The team was welcomed by the forest’s few inhabitants but often expected to join in paralyzing vodka binges. One local hermit insisted that gnomes enter his cabin each night and tickle his feet.
The effort all seems worthwhile once the owls are finally located again, said Helen Macdonald in TheGuardian.com. A fire hydrant–size creature with a 6-foot wingspan, it “resembles a beast pulled straight from the pages of a medieval bestiary.” Slaght’s team succeeds in convincing a logging company to steer clear of the owls’ habitat. Still, no local conservation effort can arrest the onslaught of climate change, and after a typhoon strikes in 2016, Slaght returns to Primorsky fearing the worst. “But—and how my heart leaped, reading it—he finds the owls still there.” A female on a high perch locks eyes with him before taking flight, “a magnificently resilient creature carried on soft wings across her wilderness of broken trees.”