Jonathan Kingdon has Parkinson’s. It would be awful enough right there, but he is 88 and so it is running fast. And since both his mother and father worked THROUGH their centenary years-!!–he feels he still has a lot to do.
Jonathan Kingdon’s magnum opus is coming. Here are a few images of JK and his past work:
A lot of people seem to forget that, though Deinonychus and even New Zealand’s Moa and Maori- eating Haast’s eagle are gone, we still have some dangerous modern dinosaurs. This thought was prompted by an e-mail discussion among well- informed friends last week. My money for real danger is on Stephanoaetus coronatus, which always seems …
Sometimes this journal seems to be a chronicle of death and dissolution. This may be natural for 68 year old man with Parkinson’s ticking away in his breast, even if his prospects are better than some people’s. But whatever mortality lies beneath, Querencia is supposed to be a celebration, even when it does obituaries. This …
I wrote soberly on the Indian Vulture crisis years ago in the Atlantic. They continued to decline; nobody gives a damn about serious whiny articles. Today, my friend Jemima “Mima” Parry Jones, daughter of the grand old falconer Philip Glasier, sent me this YouTube piece of pro- vulture propaganda, and I am envious- it will …
John Carlson, my best man in my FIRST marriage to Libby (we didn’t get divorced in between). Who but a biologist bor in Eastern MT would use his limited baggage allowance to Antarctica to pack a tux to the home colony? Read his blog at Prairie Ice… To the left, Aldo Leopold; center, Frederick “Hammy” …
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, …
One more image. An aardwolf, which is of course no wolf at all, by Jonathan Kingdon. Can you read the inscription?
Exhausted, happy, SLOW. I will not attempt to get everything out immediately. Suffice for now to say that the “gathering of the clans” was a success, and that we all had fun. Jim blogged our night at Malcolm’s signing here. More photos: A Central Asian dinner, with Russians metaphorical and real: And art, and …
I grew up looking at great dioramas, the magical combinations of painting and taxidermy that rose to a high art in the early twentieth century. Perhaps their highest expression is in two halls that depict the habitats and wildlife of North America and Africa in my favorite museum in the world, The American Museum of …