Curious how the memes of “Re-wilding” and that of animal fear (scroll down and see Reid on sharks; I hope soon to post on Timothy Treadwell) seem to be multiplying on the news pages. For Re-wilding see this good commentary in Slate, and this article on Paul Martin from the Arizona Daily Star, showing him …
PC Reburial?
i need to blur this story a bit to protect…. well, the guilty, but someone who told me this tale in confidence. A few years a young woman, relative of someone we know, told us the following. She had worked at [fill in the blank with any famous Southwestern site] and other places, and proudly …
Good News from Iraq
The Marshes are coming back.
Bernd Heinrich on Penguins
Vermont naturalist and prolific writer Bernd Heinrich, who knows a thing or two about birds and cold weather among other things, loved “March of the Penguins”. “As the movie continues, everything about these animals seems on the surface utterly different from human existence; and yet at the same time the closer one looks the more …
John Carlson On Penguins
Wildlife biologist John Carlson, last seen in a tux in Antarctica (go here for reference), offers some reasons why penguins are admirable, despite the fact they are not “cute:” …I totally agree with the young lady concerning the nasty nature of penguins, but I also feel I must defend the little buggers too. Any wild …
The Tazi Girls
The attraction of, and also the problem with “primitive” breeds of dogs is that they are intelligent. Interestingly, many pop boooks say the opposite; Oriental sighthounds, huskies, laikas are not neccessarily “tractable”– they figure things out, and you must work with them. This makes many people think they are stupid. As someone who has trained …
Life is Dangerous – Deal With It
The title Biting Back: just because great white sharks are protected doesn’t mean we should be on their menu of this LA Times op-ed almost says it all. It is symptomatic of the age we live in that an increasing proportion of our population believes that nature belongs in nature movies and we as individuals …
Of Pigs and Pit Bulls
How long can anyone sane continue to live in California? (Reid?) It’s not just the cost of living or the deficit or the smog or the crime or the massive illegal immigration– one might put up with many of those things for the glories. It’s the endless niggling laws, the superficial reverence for an environment …
Sacrificial Lambs
Have you ever wondered about the logistics of those burnt sacrifices in Classical and ancient Greece and Rome, or even in the Old Testament? Chas, hunter, professor, Pagan, and blogger, has…
On Falconry
My introduction to Steve’s writing was from the falconry side of it, a popular article in Smithsonian, sometime in the mid-80s. I was surprised to know anyone wrote so well about the sport, then surprised again to discover he writes well about a lot of things. I’m sure various pigeon fanciers, gourmands, world travellers, writers, …