Lauren is coming home next week, visiting us soon, and will doubtless be blogging for herself. In addition to training her eagle, she has done a lot of research,and to my envy got to meet the chronicler of the Gyrfalcon, Eugene Potapov, author of my favorite ornithological monograph (see link two posts down): ” I …
Month: July 2010
Just us chickens
I now have a close personal relationship with two broods of sage grouse, and Jim says I’ve got to end it soon. I know he’s right, but I hate to have to do that. The two broods – one with five youngsters, and one with six, range close together and I started to see them …
“Big Black Nemesis”; or, what is an Altai Falcon anyway?
A while ago, LabRat at Atomic Nerds started a series of posts on the evolution of sex among other things. The first was appropriately called “Shuffling Your Cards: Why Sex?” Since in science we are both mad nerds obsessed with evolutionarily odd strategies like parthenogenesis in local lizards (and the hybridization that may have started …
Learned behavior
This week was an interesting one on the Wyoming rangelands. The sage grouse broods are doing well, with the now adolescent-sized birds that accompanying their mothers. Most of the broods I’ve seen have five or six young, so it’s been a good year for chick production. The pronghorn antelope fawns are growing as well, but …
After the Hunt
My naturalization as a Louisianan must be near complete. With two local friends and my hawk, Ernie, we recently made an appearance on chef John Folse‘s cooking show, A Taste of Louisiana. The show closed a neat loop for me that began a couple years ago with the publication of my wife’s (one and only) rabbit recipe in Folse’s encyclopedic volume After the Hunt. …
Photos
For the first time I MAY be able to put in my photos rather than have Matt or Reid do it, though there are still problems–it took three tries to get the image in (telling me it WAS there twice, but it wasn’t!), and it put the image at the top rather than the bottom …
Vizslas!
Andrew Campbell of The Regal Vizsla, who blogs on bird dogs and sometimes Mongolia, came through with his boys on the way to a training session in the mountains of Arizona. He brought good talk and a bottle of Applejack, something wonderful from New York state we had never tried. His boys were fascinated by …
Three shotguns (and a look at a fourth)
…which will do almost everything. First, a magnum on the French Darne sliding-breech action. A little expensive to shoot, and a bit “kicky”, but able to take everything up to the largest birds. Second, a Stephen Grant Best London pigeon gun, with a sidelever action and rebounding hammers in the last stage of hammer evolution. …
Prince Xanghui
I have seen black and white line drawings of a falconer with a tazi from Prince Xanghui’s tomb in Xian, on the far eastern end of the Silk Road. Though I used one on my letterhead, the hawk was unidentifiable. I assumed it was a Goshawk which is still flown in the area and throughout …
Dr John Burchard on Breed Standards
My friend John Burchard, PhD, postdoc at the Max Planck Institute under Konrad Lorenz, years in Arabia with saluki and falcon, formerly involved in shows and still a presence in open field coursing and an attendant at conferences on dog genetics, (and owner of two of my pups (;-), on the inherent deficiencies of standards. …