Jonathan C. Slaght's Blog

The transition from winter to spring always brings out a curious mixture of emotions in me. For years, April had meant the end of a field season, weeks of cold and discomfort spent with my local colleagues in the Russian woods, sometimes a hundred or more kilometers from the nearest human settlement, sleeping in a […]

I’ve been quite busy the last year working on my fish owl book for Farrar, Straus, & Giroux (and Penguin in the UK), so have been a little quiet on these pages.  Popping my head up to share some remarkable bird news out of Russia. It was just reported that a Russian-American team of biologists … Continue reading Remarkable Bird Discovery in Russia

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 … Continue reading Goral on the Cliffs

A RAVEN MOVES ACROSS the unblinking Arctic sky, a prize in its bill. This treasure is an egg, possibly from one of the duck nests I’d seen nearby on the coastal Alaskan tundra. Perhaps the raven intended to crack this Arctic pearl right away or, more likely, it planned to cache it in an underground … Continue reading The Egg Thief

Like old friends meeting for lunch, a cinereous vulture and a Steller’s sea eagle pose for a camera trap set along a game trail in the Sikhote-Alin Reserve in Russia. While both cinereous vultures and Steller’s sea eagles are winter visitors to this corner of the southern Russian Far East, it’s possible that these two individuals … Continue reading An Unlikely Pair

Another good year! In total, I wrote 19 stories (down from 22 in 2016). The most important writing development of 2017, without question, was finding a home for my Blakiston’s fish owl book manuscript. Or, should I say, two homes: the manuscript was picked up by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux in the United States, and … Continue reading 2017 End of Year Summary

This Spoon-billed sandpiper was born somewhere in the Arctic of northeastern Russia, in the spring of 1988, a diminutive fluff camouflaged among the tundra vegetation. A few months later she flew south for her first winter, aiming instinctively for the intertidal mudflats of Southeast Asia. About two thousand miles into her journey—still in Russia—she found … Continue reading A Spoon-Billed Curiosity

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 … Continue reading Steller’s Sea Eagle: King of the Air

Yesterday, Tim Herrera of the New York Times posted an article about email auto replies which, after soliciting submissions, included a number of reader entries. That this simple article elicited enough of a reaction for me to write a rebuttal of sorts is somewhat surprising: we’re talking about email auto replies here. But my point … Continue reading Email Auto-Replies: Bring Your ‘A’ Game