Well, it ain’t necessarily so Well, it ain’t necessarily so Dey tells all you chillun De debble’s a villun, But it ain’t necessarily so! So sang the character Sportin’ Life in George Gershwin’s award-winning 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. Exhilarating and clear-sighted, Owls of the Eastern Ice is an impassioned reflection on our relationship with the natural world and on what it means to devote ones career to a single pursuit. Some have even argued that the fear of spiders, like the fear of snakes, is an innate fear – people are simply born with it thanks

When it comes to lists of common phobias, arachnophobia – the fear of spiders – almost always makes the top ten, and more often than not, the top five. In fact, no less an authority on natural philosophy (what would later become known as natural history) than Linnaeus himself included The phrase “here there be dragons,” so famously seen on old maps indicating places where there were great and mysterious dangers to be found, was not so very long ago not simply a metaphor. Slaght possesses all these things, and in his recently published Owls of the Eastern Ice a Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl, he presents the story of both these remarkable owls as well as the people who are not only enduring the hardships necessary to achieve a better understanding of them in order to preserve them as a continuing species, they are genuinely often risking their own lives to do so.įor all who enjoy a book that is as informative in what it conveys as it is exciting in how it recounts its story, Owls of the Eastern Ice is a book that should be immediately added to your reading list – if it isn’t there already. Studying these owls not only takes all the knowledge and skills normally expected of a field biologist, it takes exceptional physical and mental stamina, as well as the willingness to endure the harsh environment the owls call home. Standing more than two feet high, with a wingspan exceeding six feet, and a body mass that not only looks proportionally larger than other owls due to their shaggy plumage but actually is, these massive owls of the far eastern portion of Asia are the largest of any living owl species. The physical impression first given by a Blakiston’s Fish Owl is that of a small bear (“small” relative to the size of a bear, that is) with wings.

Owls on the eastern ice