I have eaten crane (not mine) and it was wonderful. They are grain eaters and don’t taste fishy as most of those others that Julie mentions, such as herons, are alleged to– more like fine roast beef. They are also wary and difficult. Actually few hunt them, and those that do know they are good …
Hunting Cranes
A link at Home Range sent me to the blog of writer and NPR commentator Julie Zikefoose, who recently posted on the topic of Sandhill cranes and her consternation at the thought of hunting them. Zikefoose’s good writing piqued Henry Chappell’s interest some time ago when she admitted sometimes not releasing the house sparrows she …
The New Bird
Believe it or not, he’s relaxing. But anything with eyes like these never looks relaxed. “God may fly a Peregrine, but the devil flies a Goshawk”.
Human Evolution is Accelerating
Back when I was in graduate school the general consensus was that human evolution had generally halted or at least slowed in the early Holocene. It was believed that the strong evolutionary pressures that had operated on early hunter – gatherer populations had eased with the transition to agricultural economies and settled life. Estimable University …
Going Postal
Your tax dollars at work. As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.
Last word on Mailer, plus..
Phillip posted below on Mailer, and I agree. A last word, from an email I sent: Betsy once wrote, for the MIT paper, an announcement on him– something like “the overrated self- regarding egotist Norman Mailer will appear…” She assumed it would be caught in rewrite but it wasn’t. His Gary Gilmore book was a …
More Pygmies
We discussed before here the interesting phenomenon that often occurs when species of large fauna get trapped on islands. Natural selection in the restricted habitat favors smaller individuals and you end up with a dwarf or pygmy subspecies. Previously we talked about pygmy mammoths in the California Channel Islands and dwarf water buffalo in the …
“Arboricide”
After my post last week on tree-trimming follies in Burbank, California, I couldn’t pass this article by. A man in Nevada is facing 35 years in prison because he felled, topped or killed 60 trees that blocked his view of the Las Vegas Strip. Honestly, you’d think we were druids.
Joe Brown
Chas has a link to an excellent piece on the fine and neglected western writer JPS (Joseph Paul Summers) Brown. I met Joe Brown when we were both signing books at a sadly defunct bookstore in Tucson. I had brought a copy of his Forests of the Night, which could give Cormac McCarthy a run …
Goshawk
For the first time in nearly a decade we have a Gos in the dining room- kitchen alcove at Casa Q: He is a bit of a rehab case– he is utterly terrified of dogs, though Ataika is trying to teach him, and when he is at a lower weight he is alleged to scream …