Back However Briefly!

Very busy with puppies and projects (and the flu) but the world keeps coming up with new stuff to annoy or enlighten. I’d rather take a break but eventually the pressure builds…

Enlightenment and fun before the bad stuff! Darren Naish has been doing so many good posts I can hardly keep up. Here , he goes against our perceptions and notes that 400 new species of mammals have been discovered since 1990! And they aren’t all little things like insectivores either.

Here, he postulates that there may be more pinnipeds to be found, and takes a serious look at the cryptozoological reports as well. Could the “sea serpent’ be some kind of radical pinniped?

Via Terrie Miller, some good pictures of Kyrgizstan, including birds and dogs, albeit with the usual misinformation (the falcon is of course a goshawk).

Our fearless friend Lauren has anew blog, Aquiling, on eagle-ry and other matters. Go for the delight– she may be the youngest Berkutchi, and the only female, but she knows more than many better- known eagle fanciers. (And here is a photo of her with puppy Shunkar; more about pups later).

Rachel Dickinson has a new book, Falconer on the Edge, coming out this summmer– I have read it, it’s good, and I will review it properly a bit later. She has also started a blog of the same name.

Pluvi (or as I suppose we now acknowledge, Helen Macdonald!) is blogging again. She just put up a remarkably odd piece of art- a watercolor of a starling painted in peregrine plumage. She has also illustrated Corvus: a life with Birds, by Esther Woolfson. It’s on my list.

LabRat at Atomic Nerds has a sane manifesto for a free life, one that as she says has no ideology, only guidelines. The two essays above this, one by her on guns and gender and one by Stingray on cigars, are also well worth reading.

Last, one I don’t know is good or not but one that makes me uneasy: Christina Nealson sent a link to this article about how the University on Michigan is going all digital. What do YOU think?

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