Trapping Goshawks in Idaho. Even if an eagle gets into the net. That’s our friend Bruce Haak, biologist, writer, and falconer with the eagle. He traps and bands every fall on an 8000- foot ridge, where winter comes early.
Author: Steve Bodio
Bleg
For a project– does anyone know where I can find a copy of the 1971 made- for- TV movie (the second Movie- of- the- Week ever!) “Harpy”, starring Hugh O’Brian, Elizabeth Ashley, and a big serious falconry- trained Harpy eagle? I believe the bird was trained by Jim Fowler, protege of Marlin Perkins. Lots of …
Getting Out..
… is most of what I have been up to. I have found a mysterious nest made mostly of lengths of various kinds of wire, with some sticks and cholla joints woven in… Some curious caterpillars… Can anyone identify it? Is it a Dysschema howardi? I saw some of those there recently… And the girls …
An Unexpected Benefit
It’s supposed to be fun. Anything you do for yourself, as a hobby or pastime, is supposed to be fun. So why do we need this reminder? We shake our heads at angry Little League fathers and puzzle over Prima Donna chess players. Probably there’s a brooding and hostile Tiddlywinks champion out there, a big …
Good Reads Elsewhere
Both Peculiar at O & P and Heidi have been producing an inordinate amount of good bloggage lately and you should really read all of it. But a few highlights: here, Peculiar writes an essay on the late Steve Irwin that is far better than my brief commemoration below, going as he does into what …
One More Religion Post
Not a subject I want to get into often here, but this essay on The New Republic’s blog ( by a writer who is a secular Jew)seemed to have some small- l liberal things to say about the Pope controversy. Money quote: “By my human standards “No man comes unto the father but through Me” …
Preview
We will soon have a European correspondent– a Magdalenian at that. Here is a foretaste: “In any event, I spent the last week in Tirana, Albania. It’s an interesting city, really in the early stages of becoming a completely different place I think. All the buildings are garishly painted in fresh coats of primary colors, …
Pure Fun
Another fine and funny female essayist has a piece up on– well, a lot of things, including bottoms, bosoms, and “Things which are neither one thing or the other”. Here as a taste is a swerve through (over?) vegetarians: “Vegetarians are a pain at dinner parties, forcing decent omnivores to eat like rabbits or the …
NOT prissy!
Larissa— who is as far from a “frigid, frustrated suburban biddy” as anyone I can think of, is furious with, among other things, crude come- ons: “But when he spoke, his intentions were so unappetizingly clear—so impersonally sex-driven –that out of abashment and instinctive non-whoriness I mentally aborted those embryonic “maybe” thoughts I had harbored …
Defense..
.. of the Pope from some unusual quarters. From the Guardian: “Poor old Pope Benedict XVI (not a description I thought I’d ever use) seems to have inflamed some excitable sections of Muslim opinion around the world with his ruminations to scientists at Regensburg University during his trip to Germany this week.” (Snip) “Benedict’s offence, …