“They evoked the same wondrous longing as some distant place I’d always wanted to visit but didn’t really know much about.” There was so little known about Blakiston's Fish Owls that in order to study them, he’d have to venture into the wilderness to find them himself. “Fish owls were like a beautiful thought I couldn’t quite articulate,” he writes. he decided to study the salmon-eating raptors. In 2005, he completed a master’s thesis on the forests’ songbirds, and when it came time for a Ph.D.

Slaght quickly became captivated by the primeval Primorye and its mysterious fish owls. “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.” Months later, after consulting with experts, he confirmed the bird’s ID: a Blakiston’s Fish Owl. “ It turned out that no scientist had seen a Blakiston’s fish owl so far south in a hundred years, and my photographs were evidence that this rare, reclusive species still persisted.” “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,” Slaght writes in his new book Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl.

Slaght accidentally flushed one of the elusive birds during a hike with a friend.Īt first, the pair wasn't sure what it was. The endangered bird is a seldom-seen resident of far-east Asia, but several hundred pairs are thought to survive in the species’ epicenter: the old-growth forests of Primorye, a remote region of Russia that borders the Sea of Japan to the east and China and North Korea to its south. There, in 2000, conservationist and writer Jonathan C. Blakiston’s Fish Owl is the largest owl in the world, but that doesn’t make it easy to find.

Owls of eastern ice