Owls of the Eastern Ice

"In a way, this isn’t an obvious book for best of climate books of 2021 because it’s about a field biologist doing fieldwork in eastern Russia along the Samarga River. What appealed to me about it was how the author—who spent four years tracking these very elusive owls that live along semi-frozen rivers and feed uniquely on fish—was so dogged, obsessive and single-minded in his pursuit of these creatures, in a very extreme and unforgiving habitat, with occasionally very odd and slightly threatening human beings lurking at the edges. It’s a classic quest story in many ways, and compulsively readable. It’s told in a very unembellished way. He’s a good writer, but he’s not trying to convince the reader of anything. He’s simply inviting us to share in his unique obsession with these animals, called Blakiston’s fish owls, which are the largest living owl of their kind. They’re up to two-and-a-half feet tall and their wingspan is more than six feet. So they’re absolutely massive, and they live in these enormous old growth trees along the river. “The facts are preliminary and necessary, but completely insufficient” It’s another version of what we can do. If Under a White Sky is presenting an impossible paradox of how we thread this Anthropocene needle of controlling our attempts at control, this is an impossible quest story. First to find the owls, and then to find ways to save them. Along the way he and his assistants design new ways to trap the owls because no one had ever tried to trap them before. They end up designing this special box that actually sits in the river, and which they stock with fish. They come up with this elaborate system of nets to capture these birds. He ends up becoming quite proficient at trapping them and then has to learn how to tag them using these special battery-powered GPS devices. He then has to recover the devices to get the data, so they have to trap the owls again. It’s a quest against impossible odds, and yet he is successful in achieving his goal, which is to understand the population of these animals, what controls that population and what kind of habitat they need to survive, so that he can help advise on creating a conservation plan. The book is a strange mixture of pessimism and hope. On the one hand, you see that the logging companies—which lease a lot of the prime habitat that these owls live on—are using many of the old growth trees that these owls need to roost in to create bridges across the river. It’s a kind of a lazy man’s bridge: they just knock the trees over. On the other hand, once Slaght realizes the importance of these relatively uncommon old growth trees with big enough holes in which the owls can nest and tells the logging companies about it, they seem to be quite happy to cooperate and make slight adjustments which potentially have a huge impact on preserving these owls’ nesting habitat. There’s a lesson here, which is that one person really can make a difference to our understanding, and that that understanding can enable relatively straightforward interventions that have a disproportionate effect. That’s what I really enjoyed."