Late yesterday afternoon, I asked husband Jim to put down my old ewe Friendly, the leader of my herd of sheep. She’s been trailing behind the herd the last few weeks, tired with old age, and yesterday she failed to rise from her afternoon bed. The guard dogs had stayed with her, keeping her company …
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Favorite notices
This was my favorite traffic sign in Turkey – I call it the “oh shit!” sign. And the photo below demonstrates that while in Spain, I certainly know how to pick a hotel.
Cattle signs
I promise I’ll soon be posting about our livestock protection dog research and travels, but in the meantime I’ve got a few other rather entertaining side notes to share. As we traveled in Spain, I noticed there were cautionary signs indicating that cattle were grazing in the area, and those signs included the shape of …
Some Desert Fieldwork
I spent about three weeks last month doing some fieldwork for a solar power project in Riverside County, California. The project is located near a large playa lake west of the town of Blythe. Specifically we were trying to determine whether seven of the prehistoric sites that we’d recorded during earlier phases of the project …
Stray
I recently had the pleasure of attending the opening reception of a new group art exhibit at the Sublette County Library in Pinedale, Wyoming. The “Common Ground Work” exhibit brought together six talented local artists with a wide variety of mediums, but one particular piece kept drawing me back: David K. Klaren’s graphite “Stray.” The …
One More Autumn Nostalgia Photo
From Tim Gallagher in Ithaca: Native leaves, semi- exotic pheasant, exotic (French Manufrance Robust) gun…
Two Skulls
Suburban Bushwhacker posted some photos of a skull that he wanted his readers to guess at. It was a European badger. I know because long ago, after were were unable to stop in what the English call a “roundabout”* to retrieve a carcass, zoologist- artist Jonathan Kingdon gave me a skull of one with the …
A meeting in the sage …
Yesterday afternoon as I was returning home from visiting a friend, I turned down a county road that traverses through the sagebrush uplands next to the New Fork River and noticed a pickup truck out in the sage, with two men near the tailgate, with a bird dog. Intrigued, I drove by slowly, and finally …
Neglected Book
Rebecca O’Connor’s Lift, her literary falconry memoir and one of the best falconer’s memoirs ever written, had such good press I thought it would automatically be come a success (this despite my having written to her about “… terrific reviews, indifferent agents, incompetent publishers, [and] few sales…”). But NOOO. She has sold only 411 copies. …
Commonplace Book: Old School
A conversation between the late Jack Mavrogordato, old school English falconer (he knew T H White, who described him as “a charming man, approximately five inches tall…”), and the more ancient Major Allen, about the still more ancient E B Michell, past master of the merlin, ca. 1976, as recorded in the English Falconer: M: …