Wildlife Biologist & Author
Earlier this month I spoke about fish owls on a BBC World Service program called Outlook, which reaches approximately 52 million listeners across the globe. I think it turned out well.
If interested, follow the link to hear this seven-minute piece. They added music and sound effects to make it moody!
This post first appeared on 16 March, 2016 on Scientific American.
One of my favorite Russian sayings, roughly translated, is that the better your off-road vehicle, the further you’ll have to walk to find a tractor to pull you free when you get stuck.
I consider this phrase regularly during each Blakiston’s fish owl winter field season. We purposefully seek out the hard-to-reach places; the quiet corners of Primorye these secretive owls might be found. We cross narrow mountain passes, struggle through gauntlets of willow along overgrown forest roads, and gun it across rivers of uncertain ice integrity. The waters are not usually very deep, but it’s never pleasant to break through.
Inevitably though, we do find ourselves stuck, or come across others in need of tractors. I spent much of February 2016 looking for fish owls with a team of three Russians led by Sergei, a fish owl veteran and an extremely resourceful fellow in the field. Three instances the past few weeks reminded me of this.
Big news!
This blog has been picked up by Scientific American, a science news and commentary site with more than 5.5 million monthly hits. My stories will appear there as an on-going series (tentatively titled East of Siberia) under their guest blog banner. The first post should be later this month (February 2016).
I will continue to post similar content to what you see here; the only difference being that my stories will be published at Scientific American first (and then re-posted here a day or two later).
If you subscribe to my blog (at right), you will receive email notifications of new posts without having to regularly check the Scientific American site for updates.
Stay tuned!
Jonathan C. Slaght 