Tag: wildlife

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Goral on the Cliffs

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Long-tailed goral. Photograph (c) WCS Russia/Sikhote-Alin Reserve

The Khuntami Cliffs are a cathedral of rock. They rise slowly from inland to crest like an enormous wave frozen just before crashing into the Sea of Japan. It’s been a favorite spot of mine in the Sikhote-Alin Reserve for years now; I’ve seen everything from nesting Eurasian eagle owls to Pacific swifts here, watched Minke whales in the sea, and seen tracks of wild boar, Asiatic black bears, and Amur tiger in the sand along Khuntami Bay below.

It was these latter beasts—the bears and the tigers—that were on my mind a few autumns ago, when I neared the top of the cliffs and something big and unseen exploded in movement from the nearby vegetation.

The mystery creature had only been a few meters away in a stunted, chest-high oak grove before it flushed and, given the wind that day, apparently had not heard or smelled me until I almost kicked it. Instead of a predator, however, I saw prey. A long-tailed goral burst from the bushes to clamber onto a vantage point to assess me as friend or foe, its hooves clicking like high heels on the rock.

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Steller’s Sea Eagle: King of the Air

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Steller’s sea eagle in the southern Russian Far East. Photograph © Jonathan C. Slaght

So large is the Steller’s sea eagle that occasionally, on a frozen bay, one of these birds can be mistaken for the hunched form of an ice fisherman. It is the bulkiest of all eagles, weighing up to twice as much as a bald eagle, and soaring over the coasts of northeast Asia on a seven-foot wingspan. The plumage of a Steller’s sea eagle is an exercise in contrasts: deep blacks cut by lines of crisp white behind an enormous, bright orange bill.

These are salmon eaters, mostly, but they also hunt some of the common bird species in their range, such as gulls and murres. In winter many individuals are drawn south as far as the Sea of Japan, where they seek out concentrations of rotting autumn-run salmon. That’s where I saw this one, along the Avvakumovka River in Primorye, Russia, where it had its pick from thousands of decaying Keta salmon clogging the shallows and pools of that waterway.

Sometimes, Steller’s sea eagles scan the coastal forests for carcasses of deer that succumbed to the rigors of winter or were killed by predators. Occasionally, they get too close to an Amur tiger’s kill, and their bodies are found broken in the snow where the tiger flung them, these kings of the air felled by the kings of the forest.

 

This post originally appeared 16 November 2017, on the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Wild View photo blog.

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End of Year Summary: 2016

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Best Wishes for 2017! (Charyn River, Kazakhstan)

Writing-wise, 2016 was a fantastic year for me. By my account I published 22 pieces—that’s about one article every two weeks. A full list is below. I also had an art show, was called the Jane Goodall of Fish Owls, and was on the BBC.

Not sure how I can top this next year….with any luck my fish owl manuscript—a 100,000 word text describing five years of Blakiston’s fish owl fieldwork—will be ready to shop to publishers in the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading in 2016, and see you in 2017!

Books:

Web Articles:

Magazine Articles:

  • Russian Life: a six-page spread in the September/October 2016 issue about Vladimir Arsenyev

Scientific Articles (in print):

  • Ursus: a paper about how gorging on salmon gives brown bears uncontrollable diarrhea, and what they do to mitigate that (Seryodkin, Panichev & Slaght 2016)
  • Bird Conservation International: the culmination of my PhD work: guidelines for conservation of Blakiston’s fish owls in Russia (Slaght & Surmach 2016)
  • Integrative Zoology: a paper evaluating effectiveness of anti-poaching methods in tiger habitat in Russia (Hotte et al 2016)

Scientific Articles (accepted but not yet in print):

  • Slaght, J.C., B. Milakovsky, D. Maksimova, I. Seryodkin, V. Zaitsev, A. Panichev, and D. Miquelle. Habitat selection by Siberian musk deer: anthropogenic influences on the distribution of a Vulnerable coniferous forest specialist. Oryx in press, Nov. 2016
  • Slaght, J.C., D.G. Miquelle, and G. Tukhbatulin. Logging roads and Amur tigers in Russia: demonstrating the threat and proposing solutions. Conference Proceedings. International Conference on the Amur Tiger: Population Status, Problems, and Conservation Prospects. 13-15 December 2015, Institute of Biology and Soil Science, Vladivostok, Russia. In press, Oct. 2016