–Two of the better known eagle falconers are coming to visit Casa Q next month. Lauren McGough, newly minted PHD anthropologist, is a long time protegee who first came here and on to Mongolia when she was sixteen. Novelist Rebecca O’Connor, who hails from California is also a longtime honorary Magdalenean. I’m trying to get …
Tag: Falconry
Silly Bird
The Aplo Tri- bryd is still ridiculous and still brainless but he is TRYING, and not squawking so much. Working him high, VERY high, is the key. Fire chief Mike Bisbee (who is married to my distant cousin Nina McCabe, and hails from NY) took these good pics the other day.
The New Bird…
is an (A) good big boy Aplo/ (B) little male Gyr {C) BIG… hybrid of unknown gender. We tend to call him “him” but are looking for a genderless trial name until or unless we have “him” DNA tested. Meanwhile, he’s a sweetheart– look how calm he was putting on jesses (Yeah, I KNOW, two …
.410
Not the gun this time- the new bird,a female Kestrel. Padre Paul trapped her during a javelina hunt, sportscasting her approach to the trap on his cell- O Brave New World!–and suggested we call her that, likening her delicate beauty to that gun. Like most Kestrels she is pretty unflappable. Three ravens killed my larger, …
Falconry Goddesses
Ourc regnant falconry goddesses, Helen Maconald and Lauren McGough, do a podcast TOGETHER at the BBC.More please! https://mobile.twitter.com/HelenJMacdonald/status/909753333317095424?p=v Full of good sense and unexpected insights-; as Helen says., only Lauren would fly an eagle because it is so SERENE. Lauren is currently in S Africa chasing drunken monkeys with a “little” male Crowned eagle. We …
The REAL Eagle Huntress
… with Annyushka, the Merlin Huntress.
Tom Cade
The oldest by a bit of the four Peregrine Fund founders, and the only man among them to be born poor (in the Depression era New Mexico Bootheel), my old friend Dr Tom Cade is still going strong at nearly ninety, Tim Gallagher caught up to him at the Irish Falconers meet, accompanied by a …
Photo Session
Stefan Wachs came down for another photo shoot, this time of me flying Matt Mitchell’s sweet Harris. There will be more…
Chukar Hunting the Old Way
My long- time Canadian hunting correspondent, Alex Sharif, who I met through Valerius Geist, is primarily a sheep hunter and a mountaineer. But when he sent me a few photos from his cousin Afshin in Idaho,I was intrigued. Afshin is a Goshawker, and he hunts Chukar in the kind of country they have always inhabited, …
Libby’s Accident (and the Urban Accipiter Phenomenon)
By now at least half the town knows that Lib fell off a ladder tending to the pigeons in the “trap” on top of the pigeon loft. I use “trap” in quotes, because normally it is a pigeon racer’s term for sort of double entrance chamber used in racing pigeon competitions to control access. But …