"Owls of the Eastern Ice"

[fiefoe]

There are plenty of dramatic moments in Jonathan C. Slaght's account of his multi-year field study of fish owls, but what sticks with me more was the more mundane things like how to make technology work for you in real life with real owls.

• It was clearly an owl, but bigger than any I’d seen, about the size of an eagle but fluffier and more portly, with enormous ear tufts. Backlit by the hazy gray of a winter sky, it seemed almost too big and too comical to be a real bird, as if someone had hastily glued fistfuls of feathers to a yearling bear, then propped the dazed beast in the tree.
• The needs of fish owls and humans are inextricably linked in Primorye; both have depended on the same resources for centuries. Before the Russians came to dip their nets in the rivers and harvest trees for construction and profit, Manchurian and indigenous populations did the same. The Udege and Nanai made beautiful embroidered clothing from salmon skins and fashioned boats from enormous, hollowed-out trees.
• Sergey brought in a load of firewood from the shed and lit the woodstove, making sure to create a draft first with some newspaper, as the cold inside and relative warmth outside had caused a pressure seal in the chimney. If he started the fire too quickly, the draft would not pull and the room would fill with smoke.
• The stove, built into a corner of the kitchen, integrated into the wall in such a way that the warm smoke followed a serpentine network through the brick wall before escaping out the chimney. This style, called a Russkaya pechka (literally “Russian stove”), allows the brick wall to retain heat long after the fire goes out, which warms both the kitchen and the room on its far side.
• a fish owl must hunt prey moving under the water’s surface. This difference in hunting strategy is manifested physically: many owls have a distinct facial disk—the characteristic, round feather pattern on an owl’s face that channels the faintest sounds to its ear holes—but in fish owls this disk is poorly defined.
• Russian social customs typically dictate that once a bottle of vodka is on the table for guests, it is not removed until empty. Some vodka distillers don’t even put caps on their bottles—opting for a thin layer of aluminum to puncture instead—because what do you need a cap for? Either a bottle is full or it is empty, with only a short period between those two states.
• The deer pushed briefly against the flow and then succumbed to it, drifting like a rudderless boat, then disappearing from view at the downstream lip of ice. I stood up for a better view and saw only the open wound of quiet, rushing water. I envisioned the deer in the darkness beneath the ice, water likely filling its lungs, another of the Samarga’s victims floating serenely seaward, the winter and village dogs now irrelevant.
• I returned to my tree hole, stunned by the quiet violence of this place. Primeval dichotomies still outlined existence on the Samarga: hungry or satiated, frozen or flowing, living or dead. A slight deviation could tip the scales from one state of being to the other. A villager might drown because he went fishing in the wrong spot. A deer evaded capture by a predator only to find death anyway because of a misstep. The line between life and death here could be measured in the thickness of river ice.
• The second floor was a single room, sparsely furnished as below but dominated by a large, four-sided plywood pyramid standing askew in its center. One of its sides had a hinged door, and I approached to peer inside. Bedding. Chepelev slept inside a pyramid on the second floor of his cabin.
• “Uh, energy?” he responded, stupefied, looking at the others as if I were crazy. Pyramid power, a pseudoscience with some popularity in western Russia that promised enhancement of everything from the taste of food to physical well-being, had apparently reached the forests of the Russian Far East.
• There are two reliable ways to get a Russian man to respect you: the first is to consume voluminous amounts of vodka and bond over the honesty exposed by the subsequent drunkenness, and the other is to go toe-to-toe in a banya. I had long ago stopped trying to keep pace with Russian men and their drinking, but in those days, I could steam with the best.
• The Samarga expedition was over. I was surprised to realize it had been less than two weeks since I’d left Terney. It had been a thirteen-day roller coaster of ice and eccentrics, with seemingly more time devoted to logistics than to finding fish owls. But I was off to a good start: field study in the Russian Far East is a constant negotiation between the research, the local inhabitants, and the elements.
• DALNEGORSK IS A CITY of forty thousand inhabitants tucked between the steep slopes of the Rudnaya River valley, founded as a mining camp in 1897 by the grandfather of actor Yul Brynner. The city, river, and valley were all called Tyutikhe until the early 1970s, when thousands of rivers, mountains, and towns across the southern Russian Far East were abruptly given new, non-Chinese names in light of deteriorating Sino-Russian relations.
• But then he noticed that the noises seemed to be coming from right where the road forked, and immediately thereafter he recalled that the logging company had the commendable and uncommon habit of blocking access to unused logging roads to prevent use by poachers, who would drive at night shooting deer, wild boar, and even tigers. When he’d realized what was likely happening, he bolted back to camp.
• we drove to the opposite side of the low barrier, then watched as the machine put its mind to the task. The bulldozer lacerated the dirt track with two perpendicular gashes, each three meters wide and a meter deep, then piled the resultant viscera of loose earth and rock in the space between.
• Had we arrived an hour later, there would have been nothing we could do: the bulldozer would have departed and we would have been stranded. Despite our near miss, I was impressed: road closures were clearly an effective deterrent to poachers. Anyone looking to hunt here illegally would stop short at this berm, then likely drive on to a more accessible area. This essentially made lands beyond the closure a de facto wildlife refuge.
• “Passport?” he responded incredulously. “I got in a boat to take my buddy to Maksimovka. What do I need a passport for?” “Because you’re in Nakhodka,” the authorities countered, “and you are asking us to let you go to Amgu, the location of a sensitive border patrol garrison. You certainly need to prove your identity to do that.”
• Given the lines of communication in those days, it took nearly two more weeks for Valeriy’s identity to be confirmed and for him to make it home. By then, he had been gone nearly a month. His family had held his funeral, mourned his loss, and begun to heal. When Valeriy reported back for work at the border patrol garrison, his superiors told him angrily that it would have been better for them if he had vanished at sea, because his metal boat, undetected for five days as it drifted about in the Sea of Japan, betrayed their incompetence.
• We stopped the truck periodically along the roads running parallel to the fish owl territories, dialed the receiver to that particular owl’s frequency, and then slowly waved a large metal antenna that looked like a deer rack in the air to determine the direction of the transmitter’s strongest signal. We were learning, however, that this practice, common in wildlife studies, was almost as much an art as it was a science. The signal from a bird sitting near the valley edge, for example, might echo off the nearby cliffs, masking the owl’s true position. <> Or if an owl was on a riverbank hunting, as opposed to sitting high in a tree, the signal was far weaker (and appeared to be farther away).
• I felt self-conscious waving what looked like outsider art as loggers and fishermen slowed their vehicles to watch as they passed.
• Just as some birds are more likely to fall for certain traps, different species react differently to transmitters. Some raptors, like great horned owls, tend to snip at the harness material to cut the device from their bodies as soon as possible, while other birds seem to pay the extra burden no mind.
• He had also been briefly employed as a delivery driver for a brewery in the 1980s during Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign, a time when beer was a precious and controlled commodity. He’d leave the factory driving a truck, he said, and by the time he reached the store or bar where the delivery was to be made, he felt like the grand marshal of a parade, tailed by a pack of thirsty Soviets wanting the rare chance to wet their palates with cold lager. Some cars would even U-turn to follow him; they didn’t know where he was going or how far the destination, only that he had beer and they wanted some.
• Just as I was warning him to apply pressure again, she burst free, instantly smashing the light bulb with her powerful wing and plunging the room into darkness. I was in a pitch-black cabin with three people and a loose fish owl. Luckily, the sudden loss of light disoriented her as much as it did us,
• These decaying forest giants, already a rare resource for fish owls, were at the end stages of life and could not suffer bouts of wind and ice with the same resilience they had in their youth. After the several hundred years it takes a tree to grow large enough to fit a fish owl, a nest cavity might be suitable for only a few seasons.
• considered myself an ornithologist, but even in Minnesota, I noted, my currency was fish. Only instead of catching spry masu salmon smolt in a down jacket and neoprene hip waders to feed fish owls, here I wore safety goggles and a respirator to net hundred-year-old trout from vats of formaldehyde.
• After only a short wait, a dark form appeared in the corner of the monitor, landing in the snow high on the riverbank. Its arrival was awkward, almost like a stage-shy actor thrust into the spotlight by an unseen hand. The fish owl sat still for a moment, assessing the scene and composing itself, then pushed through the billowy snow to the flat ice edge and the prey enclosure.
• After another period of quiet deliberation, he stared intently at the fish with a craned neck and the posture of a tiger preparing to pounce. He then leaped, feetfirst, with wings extended above his head as an osprey might dive, jumping a mere pace away into water deep enough to cover only his feet. The delivery was comical, like watching the pre-jump routine of a high diver who then steps into a kiddie pool. I’d expected something more viscerally powerful from the world’s largest owl.
• This was the classic habitat of the Siberian musk deer, strange, shy animals that forage on the lichens in these quiet forests. They are small creatures with large ears, weigh about what a dachshund does, and seem perpetually hunched forward given their disproportionately large back legs. Rather than antlers, male musk deer have elongated canines that curve from their upper lips like fangs. This smattering of exaggerated features makes them seem like an elaborate prank, the Northeast Asian version of a jackalope, and whenever I see one I’m reminded of a vampire kangaroo.
• but why did the owls care about forest age along rivers? After some thought and a lot of reading, I came up with a possible answer: it wasn’t so much the owls that needed big trees, it was salmon.
• Where there might have been a single, uniform channel before an old-growth tree fell into the water, its influence can catalyze the development of an aquatic tapestry of deep pools, backwaters, and shallow, rushing water. This diversity of river habitats is exactly what salmon look for. Young masu salmon fry and smolt, probably the most important fish owl prey in winter, need the safety and calm of backwaters and side channels to grow.
• My text came to them ragged like the ear tufts of a fish owl; their comments and suggestions polished it smooth like the surface of a frozen river (although they didn’t appreciate every single metaphor or attempt at humor).