Month: February 2018

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Not the gun this time- the new bird,a female Kestrel. Padre Paul trapped her during a javelina hunt, sportscasting her approach to the trap on his cell- O Brave New World!–and suggested we call her that, likening her delicate beauty to that gun. Like most Kestrels she is pretty unflappable. Three ravens killed my larger, dashing Merlin x Gyr; but the Kestrels in Nestor’s tin barn across the street used to pound ravens into the ground and make them WALK, protesting, out of the neighborhood.

If someone can tell me why this blog now shows me photos not as photos but as code, puts all the captions in the wrong place. I’ve moved them around three times and have not yet gotten them in the right place.

…The Gyrlin, back in the long ago day, and with the legendary Zhel.Sigh…

This bird won’t stand on food yet but will bite it, and foot you- hard!

Ink

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Lauren’s eagle is done:

She has also been flying her male Crowned eagle in Africa (“I have had many adventures in shitty countries”- me too!– and learning to fly herself. Girl makes me feel like a s†ay-at home provincial…

I Missed this Novel and it’s already in PB…

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Celine.

The a heroine is a 67 year- old New Yorker of upper- class background with emphysema and a drinking problem, controlled but not gone. She is a private detective. Her “Watson” is her husband, an ex-communist lobsterman named Pete.

She faces down a biker gang in a Red Lodge MT bar with the simple Samurai statement “I’m already dead.” Of course her hand is on a Glock 26 in her pocket and at least one of them is dead too but they don’t KNOW.

There is enough natural tragedy in the background, like there is in the lives of most seventyish people with heart and imagination I know, that there is nothing cheaply clever about it.

One reviewer compared her (the heroine, not the author) to a “wise Annie Proulx”. Not QUITE, but I know what she meant- and both are complimented…

Good New England, New York, and Yellowstone; good guns & their use; and the best writing about high- society Northeasterners, I swear, since James and Edith Wharton. I’m in love…

Very Small Pig

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“Zoo Paul” McCormack of Michigan, one of my oldest friends, runs an animal educational business.

He also owns the smallest pig I have ever seen, even when it grew up…amazing.

Another Damn Urban Coop sentenced to “Transportation.”

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This one killed a squeaker. I missed him with a butterfly net and because he only flew to he top of the fence tried again with a BC. This proved his undoing, but only because of greed- he put his foot into the trap between the bars, killed the bird, and refused to let go of its head– not attached by any nylon nooses!

Note Gorbatov Japanese Gos behind and that he is digging into the web between my fingers. Released in Socorro, he vanished faster than the camera’s shutter, like many do. Unpleasant birds, but great hunters…

Last: a Chinese- spiced risotto made from the luckless pigeon:

And one more:best release pic, of a previous bird, who flew right into the camera.

New Vadim & Joseph Crawhall

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No GOOD old dog is too old to learn good old tricks. The latest pics in Vadim Corbatov’s Russian site () include this farm scene renminiscent of the work of the dissolute short- lived English painter Joseph Crawhall, who illustrated Abel Chapman in the manner of “the painters of the caves”, according to Don Robero (Robert Bontine Cunninghame- Graham). Tom Quinn thinks his white pigeon may be the best in the world. What do you think?