Wild East

Here are a few irresistible photos from Lib’s friend Jeff Foott, who we saw in Wyoming and who just returned from our old haunts in Western Mongolia.

The third is just nice and speaks for itself. What I love about the other two is the way the Wild East partakes of all technologies from the Neolithic to the 21’st century’s simultaneously; a bit “cyberpunk” in style rather than Edwardian Steampunk…


Around the House– an Occasional series

I thought I’d post a few photos I keep up in my library, which relate to Q – type subjects- click to “embiggen” as they say in Bloglandia…

First, on the bookcase, a few mentors living and dead: Anderson Bakewell, SJ, at the Magdalena shooting range about 1987 (Tom McIntyre’s title: “It’s been HOW long since your last confession?”); Floyd Mansell with muzzleloader shooting doves with son Phil & me; Dr John Burchard with the late Badari; Sirdar M. Osman in Dehra Dun– a mentor from afar but a real one.

Some goshawks from all over– Japan, Siberia, China, Japan again, Khyber pass photo by Catherine Lassez, with me in Montana.

(If you click to enlarge you may also be amused at the unrelated clips below…)

And a few more– Joe Bodio with black duck & 40 years later with Bets & spaniels; me and Floyd by Tom Huggler ca 1985; Jonathan Kingdon as a youth in then- Tanganyika with augur buzzard, and inset nearer present; Lib out front.

Flock Flight


I never tire of watching the great winter flocks of birds like starlings, moving with eerie grace like some superorganism, supposedly by obeying very simple rules. (Photo, sent anonymously a year or two ago, by Manuel Presti; thanks, PD!)

This is most obvious when birds are under attack.Bill Kessler sent this amazing YouTube filmed in the Netherlands of a flock being harassed by a sparrowhawk, which eventually splits the “organism” in half, making it fission like an amoeba.

Richard Barnes’ Animal Logic, a wonderful book of photographs which also features things like deconstructed museum dioramas and skulls (deconstructed in this case a Good Thing) has an excellent selection of photos of starlings flocking in Rome.

(Animal Logic also has an essay by the always quotable Jonathan Rosen which may show up in Commonplace Book soon).