Every phone call from New Orleans is of interest. Andrea, first introduced in this post, surprised me yesterday with a call from the Garden District where she now lives and plans to stay for a couple years at least. It’s not the same place she remembers, says Andrea, having moved to the city just weeks …
KIRAN OVER MONGOLIA
This is my formal review of a wonderful film. Joseph Spaid, the filmmaker, sent me a pre- release copy. Folks, this is the real thing. See it if you can. A Very Different Kind of Bird FilmBy Stephen Bodio “Kiran” is the Kazakh word for “golden.” It is also the adjective that the eagle trainers …
Daddy Kills Animals
My friend Russ (a local attorney, falconer and father of two) sent this interesting image from PETA, Inc. …For the sake of this post, I’ll give PETA credit for the art but admit I didn’t check for independent verification. In its continuing battle for the next generation of paid subscribers, this well-recognized (but poorly known) …
Very Old Rock Art Revisited
The image above from Utah may look familiar to you as I blogged about it here a couple of months ago as one of the very few possible images of Pleistocene megafauna (a proboscidean) from North American rock art. After posting this I sent copies of this image to two nationally-recognized, heck, internationally-recognized rock art …
Cupules and Geophagy
A common form of prehistoric rock-art here in California is the cupule. These are shallow round depressions ground into a rock face, usually in no particular pattern. Here is a picture of my colleague Bryon Bass next to a rock covered with cupules. This location is in Kern County in the foothills of the Tehachapi …
.. and Wolf Eagles
Here is Manai, with his eagle…. …and a wolf pelt, taken by this eagle, hanging on his winter house. Eagles do not take wolves in the wild as a rule, though a biologist friend has seen one kill a coyote here, and they regularly take pronghorn here (see American Pronghorn : Social Adaptations and the …
A Ghost of Evolution
A fascinating book that Steve introduced me to is Connie Barlow’s Ghosts of Evolution. The essential biological truth that forms the book’s basis is that many plant species evolve in concert with “partner” animal species that serve as agents to disperse the plants’ seeds. The evolutionary strategy is that the plants evolve fruits that appeal …
Eagle Huggers
You’ve all heard of tree huggers. But some of my best friends have been eagle huggers. Golden eagles are long- lived, life- bonded, top- of- the- food- chain predators. This can make them very hard to train, but if they are bonded they are REALLY bonded. They are intelligent and playful– I know Konrad Lorenz, …
Iola Reid, RIP
My maternal grandmother, Iola Wilkinson Reid, died on October 1, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. She was 97 and had been in a nursing home, mentally lost and physically declining for the last five years. She really had been miserable and suffering in the home and though I was very close to her and miss her, I …
Landscape blogging
Just for fun. We had our (late) first hard frost last night. Usually we have gotten our first snow by about now. Here are a morning and evening shot of our town on a snowy day, looking south from near our house on our (still dirt except for its bottom end) main street, for those …