I saw no villages, no roads, and no people. Dramatic ridges rose high, then drooped into low valleys, waves that scrolled past for kilometer after kilometer as I watched, transfixed. Then, flying from Moscow the summer I was nineteen, accompanying my father on a business trip, I saw the sun glinting off a sea of rolling green mountains: lush, thick, and unbroken. I’d spent most of my early life in cities, and my vision of the world was dominated by human-crafted landscapes. I’d been coming to Primorye for five years at this point. Flakes of displaced bark spiraled down as the bird flew out of sight.

Having decided that we were a threat, the creature pivoted to escape, crashing through the trees as its two-meter wingspan clipped the lattice of branches. 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. 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. We were uncertain at first which bird, actually, we’d come across. This disheveled mass of wood-chip brown regarded us warily with electric-yellow eyes. Taking to the air with labored flaps, it hooted its displeasure, then landed for a moment in the bare canopy perhaps a dozen meters above our heads. On a hike in the forest there in 2000, a companion and I unexpectedly flushed an enormous and panicked bird.

This is a remote corner of the world, not far from where Russia, China, and North Korea meet in a tangle of mountains and barbed wire. I SAW MY FIRST BLAKISTON’S FISH OWL in the Russian province of Primorye, a coastal talon of land hooking south into the belly of Northeast Asia.

Owls of eastern ice