A few of us who love the primitive sighthounds worry that the program of breeding them to standard and closing the studbook, as is being proposed in Almaty, could be the first step on their road to ruin. Vladimir Beregovoy has found a scientist and dog breeder in the far western Karatau range, 400 miles …
Tag: Central Asia
Red Planet
Chas has a pic up he took while visiting what he call our “Operation Ocotillo terraforming demonstration project”. You can see Libby and me in the background. In this spirit, I thought I’d post pics of another Martian locus here, with the caption: “Though we hadn’t yet added water, the dry habitat game was abundant, …
Art of the Week
When Dan Gauss visited us, he remarked on how much art we have . Often, art becomes invisible through familiarity. Also, we have a lot that doesn’t even get hung- some we can’t afford to frame, others that just don’t fit on the walls of a four- room house. So I am going to start …
Altai Falcon
In his monograph on the Gyrfalcon Eugene Potapov confirms that, in the high mountains of Central Asia, there are areas of hybridization between those recently and imperfectly separated species, the Gyrfalcon and the Saker. These are doubtless the semi – legendary “Altai falcon” or Shunkar of classical falconry. I made a probable sighting on my …
Bear with me..
Two weeks of agent & publisher hell, slowly receding. Blogging may be light for a bit yet but here are some links, and there will be photoblogging of various creatures later. Nature and science. Carel blogs on an extremely odd, newly discovered snake that apparently has evolved a “lure” on the end of its tail. …
Flock Protectors
We have been talking a lot on our private lists lately about another loose group of working dogs now being minutely divided into “breeds”, the great flock- protecting dogs of the middle east and Asia, with some historical extensions into parts of Europe that had the “transhumance” or flock migration. I have seen working examples …
Falcon and the Snowjob
Relating to the recent pics of GWB hanging out in the Saudi weathering yard, Anne found this post by “BWildered” at the liberal blogsite Daily Kos: “Were you, like me, treated to an Abu Dhabi photo-op? Abu Dhabi royals introducing George W Bush to the arts and sciences of falconry. Where are the sharp-eyed falcons …
Pictureblogging 1: Dogs
Some tazi shots: Vladimir’s enormous five- month old Urtak in Virginia, closely related to ours: And the very different year- old Russian “Semirichenski” male Timur– a bit like our Lashyn– playing with him. Good new genes. Lash and Kyran’s gorgeous daughter Nemrah at Monica’s in the East mountains. I hear someone offered John Burchard an …
Hounds
The Asian tazi gene pool continues to expand– Vladimir now has three, in addition to mine and their offspring. Puppy Urtak is somewhat related to my dogs, and is going to be huge. Here he is at only four months with the full- grown female, Adel, who is closely related to mine. Timur, a young …
A Few from Almaty
I couldn’t make it to the Primitive Breeds Conference in Almaty Kazakhstan this year, which is too bad because many of my friends did. Here are two friends, saluki man and Arabist Sir Terence Clark and Vladimir Beregovoy, who is now based in Virginia. He is a biologist, an expert on primitive breeds, and a …