But not to the point that it has severely degraded this ecosystem. The locals have a long tradition of living off the land, hunting and fishing, while commercial industries such as mining and logging are being developed.

But the area is not free of human pressures. It is home to bears, tigers, leopards, and the elusive Blakiston’s fish owl that went unnoticed by local ornithologists for a century. Primorye, or Primorsky Krai, is a remote spit of land in the Russian Far East, wedged between China and the Sea of Japan, that is as bleak and forbidding as the cover of the book suggests. Owls of the Eastern Ice is a spellbinding memoir of determination and obsession with safeguarding the future of this bird of prey that firmly hooked its talons in me and did not let go. Hidden behind the conservation plans and the data there are amazing personal stories that are not often told. Slaght, it was a chance sighting of a rare owl in the Russian Far East that turned him onto the path of wildlife conservation. For young American Peace Corps volunteer Jonathan C. Some encounters change the course of your life. As much a portrait of the world's most extraordinary owl as of the Russian Far East itself, Owls of the Eastern Ice is a timely meditation on our relationship with the natural world and what it means to devote one's life to a single pursuit. Along the way he spends time with the Russians who inhabit the taiga and must survive in the harshest and most isolating of conditions. In this breath-taking nature and adventure story, Slaght recounts his experiences pursuing the owl through its forbidding territory, during months-long journeys covering thousands of miles, so that he and his fellow researchers can learn how to protect this endangered giant. Now Russia's evolving fortunes, logging interests and climate change present new threats to the owl's survival. The fish owl lives exclusively along the rivers of Eastern Russia, Northeastern China, and Japan's Hokkaido Island, and can best be tracked in the winter snows, so very little is known about it. In Owls of the Eastern Ice, Slaght tells the story of his decades-long quest to safeguard the world's largest owl from extinction in Primorye, a remote Russian province dominated by Ussuri taiga forest, the only place in the world where brown bears, tigers and leopards co-exist. It was the furthest south the species had been documented in over a hundred years, and a chance encounter that would change his life.

When wildlife researcher Jonathan Slaght was a young Peace Corps volunteer in the Russian Far East, he caught a brief glimpse of a Blakiston's fish owl.

Owl of the eastern ice