2010 Fish Owl Field Season

Field Update One: Delays in Amgu

By different means the field team converged on the Leonovka River territory, on the outskirts of the coastal village Amgu to begin the 2010 Blakiston's fish owl season. This year we are a 3-man crew: me, long-time collaborator Sergei Avdeyuk, and Misha Pogiba, who is new to fish owl work. Misha is gentle, inquisitive, and in his mid-50s. He has short-cropped peppered-grey hair, narrow eyes and high cheekbones, and a weakness for medevukha, a beverage derived from fermented bee hives. Misha was raised by his grandparents at an apiary; by the age of seven he was left alone with a rifle to guard the hives from marauding Asiatic black bears. He is a hunter and an ornithologist of the old school, the “let's-shoot-it-and-see-what-it-is” school of 19th-century western naturalism. Misha's wife died of cancer two years ago, and he has been taking part in various long-term ornithological expeditions since. No reason to be home, he says. When we first met, Misha winced and swore as I shook his hand. I asked him about it later. Apparently he broke one of the bones in his hand while dealing a beating to his son-in-law, a drunk who was not treating Misha's daughter well. “Some men you only need talk to and they understand”, he explained. “Others, you have to beat.”

The 2010 field season has had a rocky start; we are averaging one fish owl every two weeks. Last season, we were averaging one fish owl every three days. We are in a hurry to find our two tagged females, at the Leonovka and Kudya territories respectively, as both should be breeding this year (fish owls do not nest every year). Once a female is on the nest in early to mid March, she is off limits until her chick has fledged in spring, for fear of nest abandonment. The first bird we found in 2010 was Sasha, the Leonovka male, who came into our enclosure just two days after arriving at the Leonovka territory. We removed his datalogger and let him go. We lingered at Leonovka in pursuit of Sasha's mate Olya, who also has a datalogger. On 14 February a fish owl was back at our prey enclosure catching and eating fish. We had hoped this was Olya, but video observation showed that it was once again Sasha. He'd land next to the prey enclosure and walk towards it cautiously, every once in a while freezing and flicking his head around in various directions. Over the years he's figured out that prey enclosures are a terrific source of free fish, and are worth investigating on those rare occasions when they appear, but our enclosures have also made him paranoid. He doesn't know when and he doesn't know exactly why, but every once in a while out of absolutely nowhere, a couple of jerks grab him, push him around, and strap a blinking device to his back. It's already happened three times, and he'll be damned if he'll let it happen again. Still, the fish tempt….

Sasha flew off with the first few Dolly Varden trout he took from the prey enclosure, which suggested that he was bringing food to Olya to demonstrate his prowess as a hunter, and a male capable of providing for himself, his mate, and a chick during nest incubation and brooding. My colleague Sergei Surmach believes that at this time of the year, a female fish owl might not hunt for herself at all, even though she is not yet incubating, almost as a test of her mate's competence. If true this would be bad news for us, because this would mean that we already missed our chance to get Olya before nesting.

We'd been at the Leonovka territory for a week, and we had found no evidence of Olya hunting. She was certainly there, based on her vocalizations, but time was also running out on Katya, the other female fish owl with a GPS datalogger at the nearby Kudya territory. We abandoned Leonovka for Kudya, hoping to find at least one of our two female fish owls before she was firm on a nest.

Sergei drove separately, and when we met up again his eyes were wide. On his way through Amgu he had been stopped on the edge of town by a pair of very drunken policemen. Amgu is typically lawless, in the sense that there is no police presence, but every 3-4 months the main precinct in Ternei sends a few of their finest to the northern villages to maintain order. Typically these trips are vodka-fueled and counterproductive and this excursion was no different. As Sergei was showing one of the officers his documentation, the other flagged down a pickup truck, which slowed then turned. Sergei interpreted this as the driver moving off the road as far as possible, but the inebriated police officer interpreted this as evasion. He pulled his pistol from his holster and, aiming it at the truck, ran towards it screaming profanities. The startled driver hit the gas and lurched down the road. Both officers took to pursuit on foot, and Sergei, now forgotten, stared with slackened jaw. He quietly turned his car back on, and continued towards Kudya.

There has been very little snow this winter; it has snowed only once in Amgu since late December. We are largely dependant on finding fish owl tracks in the snow along river banks to identify where the owls hunt, and t his year most river edges are bald ice. Therefore, we are essentially guessing when we set our prey enclosures and wait for the owls to discover them, a process that eats a lot of time. After five days of waiting, there was finally fish owl sign at one of the three prey enclosures we set at Kudya.

The next night we set up our infrared camera to see which of the pair was coming in, a decision which resulted in some of the best video footage we've collected of fish owl behavior to date. Both Dzhonik the resident male and Katya the resident female took fish from our enclosure, reveling in the feast. Dzhonik hooted then offered his mate a fish, a clear sign of courtship behavior, and with shrieks and outstretched wings Katya accepted. Dzhonik even stood in the enclosure and lunged at the fish with his beak, the way a chicken pecks at grain. The next night we set two snares, Sergei hiding in the bushes at one and me at the other. What we did not anticipate was how bright the night would be; the moon was nearly full and the sky cloudless. The owls saw us immediately and did not come in to our enclosures. We backed off. We continued to monitor our enclosures for a week from 7pm-7am, and as of yet Katya has not come back. Nights have been very cold, to -27 ° C, which causes ice dams on the Amgu River. In turn, these dams back up the river and flood our enclosures by morning. Each day we spend several hours hacking at the ice with axes and sticks to break down these dams so that by evening we can once again set the enclosures.

We hear the Kudya pair duetting further up river every night, and they have hunted near our enclosure, but the ice has prevented them from actually accessing our fish. Time is running out. In 2008, the last time she bred, Katya was already on the nest by 08 March; that leaves us a window of about a week to get her, otherwise we will have to wait until spring.

Generally speaking, a lot has been working against us this season; the weather has been uncooperative at best, and because of their nesting intentions, females are find this time of year. We have been forced to linger at territories with tagged females longer than we normally would, and thus our field efforts have not been efficient.

After Kudya, we need to find a male at the Saiyon territory, 20 kilometers north of Amgu, then travel about 200 km south to Ternei where we have two males, and then another 200 km south further still to Olga, where we have our final tagged fish owl. This does not leave me a lot of time as my visa expires in a month. But, if need be, the field crew can continue without me. So, although we have already collected good data, things are moving slowly. Hopefully, the next update will be full of our successes, and paint a rosier picture of the 2010 field season.