What Kirk Saw

Feather dinos! Feather Dinos with colors An Oviraptorid nest, with a comparison to a brooding Peregrine– a thing “wings” could be used for before flight.. Antarctic Explorer Lincoln Ellsworth’s shotgun : Australopithecines! Smithsonite (Magdalena’s official mineral) TR & Kirk

Visiting the American Museum

For a certain group of American naturalists, probably mostly for boys growing up in the fifties, the AMNH in New York City, referred to familiarly as “The American Museum”,  was the greatest influence, almost a mentor in itself .  (Though one must be wary of such sweeping statements. Will Beebe probably did more for women …

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Tanuma Photos

I have carried around a 1969 Life magazine (with a photo of Ted Kennedy just post- Chappaqudick on the cover!) because it has a gallery of wonderful images by photographer T Tanuma.Yesterday, hoping to put them in a more secure mode, I photo’d them.These are some of the results.

“James Bond’s Armourer”

Geoffrey Boothroyd really did write me on Model 12 Winchesters. He also really held that “position”- a critical letter to Ian Fleming on guns, early in the series, led to Fleming’s whimsically writing him into the books as a character. With Fleming, early in his career. Here is the Winchester letter. He later provided an …

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Interactive Olgii

Belatedly (because of TOO MUCH GOING ON the past few weeks), an unusual interactive video of eagle hunters in Olgii, courtesy of local reader James Cherry. If I were to guess,. I would say it is on the hill on the east side of valley, south of Olgii town, near where Manai used to live… …

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Fine Shotguns: A Review

Subtitled The History, Science, and Art of the Finest Shotguns from Around the World, John Taylor’s big- format paperback from Skyhorse is both moreambitious and far more difficult a task than it might appear to be, andfor the most part he has succeeded splendidly. No, that’s not fair; heHAS succeeded; that is to say, I have …

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Pre-review

I read Larry Millman’s At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic, a few months ago, and was so impressed I immediately gave him him  a blurb. I didn’t give it any more thought until checked today to see when it was coming out, and he told me they …

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