I promise I’ll soon be posting about our livestock protection dog research and travels, but in the meantime I’ve got a few other rather entertaining side notes to share. As we traveled in Spain, I noticed there were cautionary signs indicating that cattle were grazing in the area, and those signs included the shape of …
Month: November 2010
Some Desert Fieldwork
I spent about three weeks last month doing some fieldwork for a solar power project in Riverside County, California. The project is located near a large playa lake west of the town of Blythe. Specifically we were trying to determine whether seven of the prehistoric sites that we’d recorded during earlier phases of the project …
Stray
I recently had the pleasure of attending the opening reception of a new group art exhibit at the Sublette County Library in Pinedale, Wyoming. The “Common Ground Work” exhibit brought together six talented local artists with a wide variety of mediums, but one particular piece kept drawing me back: David K. Klaren’s graphite “Stray.” The …
One More Autumn Nostalgia Photo
From Tim Gallagher in Ithaca: Native leaves, semi- exotic pheasant, exotic (French Manufrance Robust) gun…
Two Skulls
Suburban Bushwhacker posted some photos of a skull that he wanted his readers to guess at. It was a European badger. I know because long ago, after were were unable to stop in what the English call a “roundabout”* to retrieve a carcass, zoologist- artist Jonathan Kingdon gave me a skull of one with the …
A meeting in the sage …
Yesterday afternoon as I was returning home from visiting a friend, I turned down a county road that traverses through the sagebrush uplands next to the New Fork River and noticed a pickup truck out in the sage, with two men near the tailgate, with a bird dog. Intrigued, I drove by slowly, and finally …
Neglected Book
Rebecca O’Connor’s Lift, her literary falconry memoir and one of the best falconer’s memoirs ever written, had such good press I thought it would automatically be come a success (this despite my having written to her about “… terrific reviews, indifferent agents, incompetent publishers, [and] few sales…”). But NOOO. She has sold only 411 copies. …
Commonplace Book: Old School
A conversation between the late Jack Mavrogordato, old school English falconer (he knew T H White, who described him as “a charming man, approximately five inches tall…”), and the more ancient Major Allen, about the still more ancient E B Michell, past master of the merlin, ca. 1976, as recorded in the English Falconer: M: …
More Commonplace Book Fun
From Charles Darwin’s “pro” list in favor of marriage when he was a young man: “A constant companion, one who will feel interested in one (a friend in old age)– object to be beloved and play with.” Pop song constantly playing on Zimbabwe radio when I was there many years ago: “Be patient You will …
A Commonplace Book
For years I have kept what the English call a commonplace book, a place to write down quotes. I gave it up a few years ago, but have started up again. Re- reading it (or them; I have several volumes), I have discovered things worth adding to the blog, from the whimsical to the serious. …