Blakiston’s Fish Owls are the largest owls in the world, with six-foot wingspans and weights in the range of Bald Eagles. These endangered birds are found at very low densities across northeast Asia, where they hunt for salmon and other aquatic prey in clean mountain rivers and nest in the cavities of enormous trees. Jonathan C. Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society has spent more than twenty years working on conservation issues in the Russian Far East, fifteen of them with Blakiston’s Fish Owls, and is a foremost expert on the species. He will provide an overview of the landscape and the diverse wildlife found within the region, followed by a description of Blakiston’s Fish Owl biology, ecology, and the efforts of Slaght and his Russian colleagues to protect them from extinction.
Jonathan C. Slaght, is the Russia and Northeast Asia Coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), managing research projects that involve endangered species and coordinating WCS avian conservation activities along the East Asia-Australasian Flyway from the Arctic to the tropics. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Slaght’s writings, scientific research, and photographs have been featured by the BBC World Service, The New York Times, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, The New Yorker, and Audubon Magazine, among others. He translated Vladimir Arsenyev’s 1921 natural history classic, Across the Ussuri Kray (Indiana University Press, 2016), and he authors a blog for Scientific American about his fieldwork titled East of Siberia. His experiences tracking Blakiston’s Fish Owl in Russia, Owls of the Eastern Ice, was published in August 2020 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The book was on the longlist for the 2020 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
A recording of the full program is available below: