News comes from India that a tortoise believed to be 250 years old has died in a zoo in Kolkata. A good “paper trail” exists to document this long life span as the animal was the pet of Robert Clive (1725-1774) British military commander and founder of the British Empire in India. We know that …
Not Much Time
Stop the California coursing ban!
Pigeons of the Middle East..
.. and North Africa. Janet Jones, the archaeologist who was one of my companions on my Turkish Kurdistan trip in December, has been in Egypt, where she photographed these adobe dovecotes. The dovecotes are the “beehives” on the roofs. The birds I saw in Turkey, especially in and around the city of Urfa, fascinated me …
Catchup
A roundup of bloggish news, brief but I hope interesting. “Wild Play”: Alpha Enviros don’t grow in front of computer screens. When John Craighead and Jane Goodall are on the same page, maybe we’d best listen. (John must be ninety now– we should all be that tough). Go to Matt’s blog for an important post …
Pack Pics
The one above shows the pack’s canine condo in the background.
Missing
We have been missing in action for a week– cooking, cooking, eating, eating, and (though I rather hate its use as a verb) “partying”. To quote from a letter I sent to the Alpha Enviro: “We have spent most of the week cooking for the two day end- of- the- season hunt and party of …
Random Beach Art
I think a lot of art-oriented people live around here. While walking at the beach where we sighted the infamous driftwoodman, we saw some new installations the other day. This one was rectilinear. This one incorporated several holes. The dogs were convinced there were gophers down in them and I had to shoo them away …
Reading Bourdain
I’m reading Anthony Bourdain as suggested in this post by Steve. Herein Bourdain, a classically trained chef with an eclectic, hair-raising resume, recounts an insider’s life in his trade. In this sense, Kitchen Confidential is like The Hungry Ocean by swordboat captain Linda Greenlaw. Or The Undertaking by—yes, undertaker—Thomas Lynch. Like Lynch and Greenlaw both, …
Dancing Neanderthals
This study is a very different approach to understanding early human (and pre-human) social behavior. It stresses the valuable role that dancing and singing would have played in enhancing group solidarity and communication in hominid bands during the Pleistocene. These researchers feel it was so important that it left genetic markers. A sample of contemporary …
Spring Poppies
These California poppies (Eschschalzia californica) are in bloom where we’ve planted them under our mail box. It is the state flower and a sign of what passes for spring here in Southern California. Our climate is so temperate that spring isn’t so much a sign of warmer temperatures as it is a change from a …