Jutta’s dancing dogs, Nhubia the tazi and Taalai the taigan, are back..
Author: Steve Bodio
Astonishing Paintings
From Jim Moore: astonishing paintings of Passenger pigeons in a strange thirties style, maybe even cooler than Ford’s, below.. More tomorrow.
Charles Schwartz RIP
Bruce Haak emailed me last night that my old friend Charles Schwartz had died, from a fast-acting brain tumor. I hadn’t even known he was sick. Charlie was a great falconer, and a perfectionist. He ended up flying passage Gyrfalcons and Sage grouse, in the high deserts of Idaho; this high-end grouse hawking is still …
I’m back
I hope you didn’t think I would announce the impending 4000th post and then quit on you! I am just coming back from an extraordinarily hard couple of weeks, starting when I tried, rather arbitrarily, to quit one of my PD drugs without checking in with my neurologist. She might have advised me that it …
Number 4000 approaches
This is blog post # 3970. It is hard to believe, but Q the Blog, started very tentatively in June of 2006 with the help of Matt Mullenix, has now contained more words, and had more readers, than any of my books. Several times I almost gave it up, but somehow, the appreciation of friends …
Pigeon Romance
Jack sent this panel from the estimable Bird and Moon, who previously gave us the movie raptors taking off their lizard costumes in relief, to show their feathers underneath.
The January Hills…
and their denizens. Federico Calbolli sent me this video of a hunting fisher in Canada. It is a great hunting scene– watch how she overcomes the hare -pure speed and focused audacity! Here is the video, and text: They are splendid but slightly scary creatures. Long ago I lived in western Mass, in a drafty …
Birds like Dogs!
I used to have a whole photo section called that, but Daniel reminded me of it when he sent these pics of his girl pup Maggie playing with Bramble, the falcon. He writes: “She plays rough with the other dogs (this is a ‘doggy’ bitch, for sure), but never touches the bird. “He is quite …
Tom McGuane on Raptors
Novelist Tom McGuane, while noted for his horses and pointing dogs, has always had a feel for birds of prey, notices them, and on occasion writes lyrically about them. There is a vivid set piece in the novel Something to Be Desired, in which which the protagonist, LucienTaylor, takes his young son, who does not …
Woodcock Here and There..
Well, not really here. The only Woodcock I ever saw in Magdalena was a storm-blown starving vagrant that some neighbors brought me and that died of starvation by the next day–being 500 miles off course does not bode well for birds. No, I mean in the US, and in the traditional haunts of ‘Cock in …