I think it was for Slaght's post-graduate work that he decided to go to Eastern Russia and study the Blakiston's fish owl. This owl is the largest in the world, measuring in at a height of over two feet and a wingspan over six feet. Slaght had seen one by accident years before and he became captivated by the animal. It is an ambitious undertaking to study an animal in the winter in a very secluded part of Russia. Fortunately, Slaght spoke Russian, and he was definitely in for challenges and adventure.
Besides acquiring funding and permission for his project, Slaght's main challenge was finding the endangered birds. Although they are huge, they also fly silently and come out in the dead of night to hunt. Slaght teamed up with local experts to help him navigate the area (often on snowmobiles) and find the birds. It was a thrill just seeing one, but his challenge for the next winter was to capture owl pairs and track them to learn their movements. This was a process fraught with trial and error. First, they couldn't catch any birds, then they had trouble with the trackers. They finally developed a process that seemed to work.
Slaght was an interesting and relatable narrator. This book was a bit of an adventure story as he made his way through an unknown (to me) world. Both the landscape and the people could be challenging. It seemed drinking was a large part of social interactions, which often caused literal headaches. There was also very little knowledge of the Blakiston's fish owl in the local population. Many of them did not know that the owl is endangered and either didn't know or didn't care that they shouldn't be killing them. Slaght also described a slaughter of native deer when the snow got too high for them to travel on anything but the roads. On the one hand, the local population needed the food. On the other hand, what they are doing is not sustainable and will harm them in the end.
I love animals, nature, and wildlife, but I've always preferred a hands-off approach--even if that limits how much you can learn. I remember an article I read about biologists studying elk calves. (I think I'm remembering this correctly, but it was a long time ago). They were darting the calves, doing various tests, and then leaving them where they found them to recover. What they didn't immediately realize is that eagles were picking off the elk calves when they were still vulnerable from the darting process to the detriment of the elk population. Sometimes humans go charging into "nature" with high ideals and end up doing a lot more harm than good. I also think that humans can be so focused on discovering something new that they don't necessarily care about what it's doing to the animal--especially the effect it's having on those individuals they interact with.
I have to admit that I was inwardly cringing when Slaght described the chaos surrounding the capture of some of the owls. At best, it was a harrowing experience for the owl that could possibly change its nesting and eating habits. At worst, one of the owls was soaked in the process, forcing them to keep it overnight. If it had been nesting, the endangered chicks would have died from cold. In addition, the first trackers were put on with harnesses. When they recaptured the birds to get the information, the birds had destroyed or worked their way out of most of them. So, not only did they have to capture the owls multiple times, but they didn't get any information, and the harnesses were obviously an annoyance or distraction because of the effort the owls took to get out of them.
In the end Slaght was able to track the owls more efficiently and mapped their territories, which will hopefully help agencies conserve the watersheds where the owls hunt and live. I do not know enough to know whether the information Slaght gained from his research was worth the harassment of the birds. It seems that he was able to gather heretofore unknown data that would be difficult or impossible to otherwise find in those conditions. I appreciate how much you can learn by tracking, and I feel like my position may be more on the fringe, idealistic side. However, I would prefer to learn the most we can in a noninvasive way whenever possible.
Finally, I feel like there was one missed opportunity with the audiobook. Slaght goes into great detail describing the mating call of the Blakiston's fish owl as well as describing the process in recording that call. But he didn't include it in the audiobook! I was waiting and hoping to hear it for myself. It would have been a great opportunity to creatively get the most out of the different medium.
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