No the man is not about to be eaten by the dog! That’s our Aziat Rant, giving husband Jim a love tap while they were wrestling around on the ground after we fed the sheep today. A look at the muscling in his front legs demonstrates why these dogs are famous as wolf wrestlers. Rant …
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Air Force
Snapped this shot on the fly today. It’s a hard winter in western Wyoming with deep crusted snow, and mule deer and pronghorn are starting to winterkill. Carcasses of big game animals are immediately targeted by avian predators. A weak rough-legged hawk landed at Jim’s gravel pit yesterday, so he called state wildlife officials. Poor …
A Vet Bleg
A good blog friend, the pseudonymously named “Max” of Life Beyond Falconry, has a request for a good friend in dire straits. For many reasons Max and I share a lot of info on active people with dire health problems (an instance: Max lost a spouse to Cystic Fibrosis, which I have a heterozygous gene …
Carving history
Kolyo Stayko shows the head of his shepherd’s crook as his sheep and goat herd grazes one morning on the mountainside near Chepelare, Bulgaria. Many herders in Bulgaria carve ornate heads on these ancient tools that are used to ensnare the leg of individual animals for capture and handling. The serpent symbolizes the earth, and …
Girlie guns
My comment to an earlier post that “As for me, I herd with a firearm”generated the question of what exactly I carry. The two pistols and two shotguns in these photos are my regular companions, so please ignore how dirty and scratched they may look – these aren’t collector’s items, but are tools like shovels …
The Kazakh Bird Dog
When I got Ataika from Kazakhstan years ago her people insisted that a good tazi would also work as a bird dog to the gun, and wouldn’t need much training. Atai has always worked as a hare courser and a falcon’s partner (see last weekend’s post) and during the one month she was taken out …
Kipling Goshawk
As mentioned below, Rudyard Kipling’s father John Lockwood Kipling, artist and museum curator, wrote a book on Indian animals (Man and Beast in India, 1892) which includes a bit on falconry. Here is HIS gos.
Reducing carnivore conflicts
Many Q readers are familiar with my family’s varied efforts to keep large carnivores from preying on our domestic sheep, and of my firm belief that we wouldn’t be in the sheep business without the use of livestock protection dogs. This time I’m going to share a story of the efforts of family friends, the …
More Far Away- and Great First Lines
“He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam- Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib- Gher– the Wonder House, as the natives called the Lahore Museum”. The opening lines of Kim, of course. My friend Grayal Farr, formerly of the Special Forces, naturalist, archaeologist, and fellow Kiplingite (see Kipling’s “The …
Far Away and Long Ago: Family with Megafauna
Just for fun: a shelf in the library has accumulated a bunch of photos with this theme, dating from the thirties (Betsy Huntington) to just eleven years ago (me). Here are a few. First, Betsy, at four, with her mother, at the Pyramids: Second, Libby on an elephant, in the early seventies, at TIGERtops (see …