My friend Gil Stacy is a naturalist- hunter, reader, game cook, and fine gun addict who lives in Georgia and hunts everything with zest and style. While like me not… quite a collector, he has things like a Fox or two, an uncommon ten magnum Ithaca, English boxlocks. He even likes FRENCH guns, putting himself …
Month: March 2015
Where Did Everyone Go?
It’s not unusual for us to see raptors buzzing the deck with a resultant mad scramble of birds on the feeders heading to cover. We don’t usually get to see the hawk or falcon, just the scattering prey. I don’t know much about the raptors’ success rate, but there is currently a pile of …
Paradigm Shift!
It’s happening NOW. Tim Gallagher just sent me this image from a comics website: feathered tyrannosaurid attacking Roman legionnaires!
More Helen Rockstar
New York Review of Books Press is now using the H is for Hawk connection in ads for its edition of The Goshawk. UPDATE Helen sent us the schedule for her April American book tour. As she told us, it’s rather coastal. If she’s going to be near you, go see her. 4/7 Tuesday …
Covers
…The kind of covers you may buy a book to get. Despite my limited space I have a few. One book below was bought for its cover and illos, the Ibex story; one excellent series, published by Putnam’s in Boston in the early years of the last century, is made up of good natural history …
New Addition
Connie and I had been threatening to get back into the horse business for some time. Recently we bought a three year-old Warmblood/Holsteiner mare. Above you can see a girl and her horse. Her official name is South Beach GES, but we’ve given her the barn name of Sophie. Buckskin Warmbloods are not common. She …
Residues and Residues
It has become increasingly common in archaeology to test the working edges of excavated artifacts for the presence of blood or protein residue. In some cases we can determine the species of animal was impaled or cut by the tool. Several years ago I posted about the Mahaffy Cache, a cache of Clovis tools discovered …
Homo erectus Shell Engraving
Earlier in the week in that post on Neanderthal jewelry I indulged myself in a little rant on how important discoveries can be made while reanalyzing collections from old excavations. I’d forgotten another recent example. The Trinil site on the island of Java in Indonesia, was excavated in the early 1890s by Eugene Dubois. The site …
Convergence
No one has ever explained this close evolutionary convergence to me; even Jonathan Kingdon thought they looked less alike than they do. Nearctic Meadow “lark”: an icterid ((New Word blackbird), common here and a lovely singer; and African Longclaw, also a bird of savannahs. But HOW? I am sure we will someday figure it out, …
Another Quote
Courtesy of Carlos, and probably from his library which makes my good one look rather anemic.. [He was] “… subject to a kind of disease, which at that time they called lack of money.” (Rabelais, chapter 16 of Gargantua). Carlos examining interesting books from the family library in his own collection in Laramie; I am …