Shot in the Bark (Dog Groomer Mysteries #8), by Chelsea Thomas

Big + Little Press, February 2023

Amy and her Granny Petunia are running a successful pet grooming business in the Toluca Lake area, in Los Angeles. It's successful enough that former child star, now lifestyle guru Tessa May Wilson, wants Amy to groom her pets.

Her pets, though,  are Silkie chickens, which will be a first for Amy. She's never groomed chickens, or heard of Silkies. But Tessa May says she just wants them fluffed, and this is a great opportunity for Amy. It's agreed that Amy will pick up the chickens in her van the next day.

When Amy, Granny, and Amy's friend and employee Betsy, arrive at Tessa May's home, they find the chickens, but no Tessa May. After a little poking around, they do find her mother, Wilma Wilson, dead. Strangled with a chicken leash.

Wilma and Tessa May were quite publicly estranged, after Tessa May sued her mother over mismanagement of her earnings as a child actor.

Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl, by Jonathan C. Slaght (author, narrator)

Tantor Audio, ISBN 9781494547790, October 2020 (original publication August 2020)

As a fledgling birdwatcher, Jonathan Slaght, in the far eastern Russian province of Primorye, saw, and managed to get a picture of, a very large, and unfamiliar, owl. When he sent the picture to experts, they identified it as a Blakiston's fish owl, the world's largest, and most elusive, owl.

When Slaght took that picture, the fish owl had not been seen that far south in a hundred years. Its range stretches from Hokkaido, Japan, to Primorye in Russia, and it's both elusive and endangered. Slaght was working towards his Ph.D., and had found his research topic--very little was known about Blakiston's fish owl, and it's endangered. Learning more about both the bird itself, and its habitat needs, to create a conservation plan, would be an excellent project.