Beginning Training

Took Shunkar (usually known as simply "Bird " or "Birdbrain") out today for his fist lesson on the lure. He spent a lot of time just staring, amazed, but he was hungry and got to the lure eventually.

Sunday Links

A roundup of usual suspects, more, and worse...

Derb is on the evo beat-- the book he recommends sounds like a winner, and I have put it on my Wish List. But "Intelligent" Design shows no sign of going away-- the bill he opposes here just passed.

Are bananas about to disappear from our breakfast tables? A parable of our agricultural state...

Mrs P on the peculiarity (ahem) of our state seal.

LabRat of Atomic Nerds on things that things Stingray is not allowed to do. Gee-- sounds pretty normal to me...

When pigs fly: Australia liberalizes its gun laws.

This George Will column touches at least peripherally on something that occurred to me: will Keller, counterintuitively, mean that McCain gets FEWER votes because those motivated to vote for him solely to defend their right to bear arms now feel less urgency?

Is Thomas Jefferson resonsible for the ranchette epidemic?

Albanian virgin warrior women.

Is a "green" convention possible? I find this hilarious. As someone said, the greenest option would be to stay home and do it virtually. Like THAT would happen, with no ego gratification...

Small Polish farms devastated. Subsidies for Big Ag are evil.

Tibet's parasitic medicinal fungus is discovered, and suddenly everyone wants a piece, with predictable results for the environment. China of course plays a part. Luckily (though not much info is given here), American ingenuity seems to have figured out how to grow it "domestically".

A mountain lion eats a New Mexican, not too far from here. Though I worry more about them getting my dogs, I'll continue to go armed in lion country.

An unusual piece for the NYT: hunting hogs with pitbulls! (And no sign of disapproval.) HT Dr Hypercube, whose site has been so full of good things, from books to terraria, you should just go there immediately and follow all his links.

For fans of the American Museum of Natural History in New York (since my childhood not only my favorite museum but the Platonic ideal of a museum) comes this is a splendid link to photos of its history, including all manner of taxidermy, diorama building etc. (HT Brian at Laelaps.) Those interested in such subjects should also check out the latest issue (number 6 ) of the online magazine Antennae which is devoted to new "art" taxidermy. Antennae is a sort of avant- garde scholarly mag about animals, but less forbidding than that sounds. You can download it as a PDF, which is worthwhile for the fantastic images alone.

Bats get no respect, and many are in trouble. Carel Brest van Kempen blogs about them here.

Big changes in bird phylogeny coming after new studies. I can see the parrot- falcon connection but some of these are unexpected! I suspect I will be doing periodic updates. HT John Carlson at Prairie Ice.

Morer sooner I hope..

Heller

Maybe-- 2 1/2?-- cheers for the Heller decision. A lot of people still want to load it with enough restrictions to make it meaningless, but at least the principle is affirmed.

Funny how so many people want the WRONG interpretation to be kept-- even though most scholarly opinion, including that of such honest liberals as Laurence Tribe, affirms "originalist "intent.

Stingray of the Nerds has a more rigorous take here. I',m inclined to agree, with LabRat's caveat about violent felons.

Lots on deck, from lizard pix to Albanian warrior virgins to bird phylogeny, soon...

Steampunk?

Could this be the new counterculture? Someone born before 1970, help me out, here. I'm too young to have known the last one.

They call it steampunk, an aesthetic and a subculture "that simultaneously embraces burlap and iPhones." Whatever it is, I kind of like it.

This more-than-retro computer keyboard first caught my eye.


Then this video showing the artist who created it making a companion flatscreen in similar Victorian fashion. Call me crazy, but that's artistry. That's craftsmanship. That's a $300 Dell monitor with brass fittings and a marble stand!



Maybe this is just the new Creative Anachronism, a twist on something we've seen before. Folks who just like being different, camping out in every sense of the phrase.

We like different. No real complaints there.

But where the medieval times and civil war reenactors typically chose to stay "in character," at least for scheduled events, these steampunk folks seem to pick and choose what they like from both current and their preferred eras, blending them into a full time style of life.

There looks to be some selective rejection of the trappings of consumer culture here, a positive trend. Some effort to exert a little control over the forms. There is some nostalgia here, too, although none of these people can be old enough to have real memories of mechanical typewriters or telegraph machines. So is the nostalgia more basic, a yearning for an analog, push button, personal touch technology that has somehow been buried in decades of molded plastic?

I find this an appealing aesthetic in the way the movies Dune and the more recent Golden Compass married the steam-engine and digital worldviews. It adds a sense of solidity to everyday items we've come to see as disposable. In this sense, I think it reflects a similar impulse to the one driving the "slow movement" of organic farming and sustainable living.

Although my interests in falconry, coursing, cooking, writing, gardening, acoustic music, etc., predate my recognition of these activities as possibly "nostalgic," I can now see that as part of their satisfaction. But they are all also contemporary and living forms of art; they are not merely affectations.

Like this steampunk aesthetic, if I read it right, these hobbies and pursuits are manifestations of an appreciation for real life, tactile and lasting, wherever you find it.

No-so-undiscovered tribe

The news we passed along a couple weeks ago regarding the "discovery" of an unknown rainforest tribespeople turns out to have been fabricated, somewhat.

In fact, the people are real, but their existence and location have been known for 100 years. Evidently, the photographer felt it was time to give rainforest protection another PR shot in the arm.

Did the end justify the means?

Friday Feeder Friend

Squirrelus americanus. This poor fellow was quite frustrated trying to get into the squirrel-proof feeder. But judging from the chewed up cones under our pine trees, he's doing okay in the pine nut line.

Bookride

Don't know how I hadn't found it before (or for that matter exactly how I did) but Bookride may be the best bibliophile site I have ever seen. It is written by a long- time bookseller with a shop in Charing Cross Road, for people like me-- people who in the words of Albuquerque bookman Jerry Lane are in need of a "book muzzle". It is literate, erudite, and at times laughing- out- loud funny. It is very English if you like such things-- I do-- and utterly without genre snobbery, or any other kind. It impartially covers "literature", children's books, crime, sci- fi, science, military books, erotica, photography, and any other category you can think of, from the Renaissance to the present, from books worth $25 to $90,000.

Nigel can really get on a roll. Here he is on a too- detailed description of a battered copy of a 1951 children's book called Bulldozer:

"It is described in what I call the Alain Robbe Grillet style --i.e. so much detail that it is hard to envision what the thing actually looks like. The cost for this paperback is $70 - take it away Alain:

'...Fair binding cracking at page 100; heavy spine crease; moderate crease along spine edge of front cover; slight crease along spine edge of back cover; ½" trinangular chunk missing from front fore-edge; ½" closed tear to top back spine edge; 1" closed tear to top and bottom front spine edges; small, slight crease to back corners; two heavy creases to bottom front corner; heavy crease to upper front corner; rubbing and chipping to upper edge of front cover; rubbing to other edges; rubbing, slight soil to covers; several indentations to front and back covers, two penetrate to next two pages; crease to bottom corner of about a dozen pages; age tanning to pages and inside of covers, pages are not brittle; moisture stain to margin of bottom corner of first 18 pages, does not affect the text; rectangular piece cut out of top corner of front endpaper; ¼" closed tear and crease to fore-edge of last three blank pages...'

He adds: "If the book was stabbed through the middle with a greasy kebab skewer and then dropped in a puddle it could hardly be worse but after all this we are assured '...pages are clean, no marks to text, no owner signatures, inscriptions, store stamps, remainder marks.' I would avoid buying the library of the collector who buys this."

I also like his concept of what he ends up calling the Mad Hatter Book:

"I've been looking for a name for the phenomenon referred to a few days back with Lady Liza Lizard - a the book that became more expensive in web listings as the condition got worse. I wrote: 'Sometimes you get a perfect vertical gradation where there are, say, 6 copies each more expensive than the other and the most expensive is in the worse condition and as they get cheaper they improve in condition with the cheapest being the best. This is perfectly logical because the more greedy a seller is the more he will ignore the effect of condition on price - so the worst copy is often the most expensive."

Go to this site if you love books, for the delight. You will doubtless learn more than a few things. But don't go for investment advice. As Nigel says, the only real advice there is that "The old cliche about buy what you love still holds... "

Woodland Park

I kept forgetting to post this picture of a great antler arch we saw in the town of Woodland Park while on our way to the Florissant Fossil Beds some days back.

Also, great views of Pike's Peak from Woodland Park.

Caffeine Addicts Rule

Wonderful news for us coffee junkies that long-term coffee drinking does not appear to increase a person's risk of early death and may cut a person's chances of dying from heart disease. Between the recently documented benefits of drinking coffee and red wine some of us have a good chance of living to 150 or so.

Lake Ontario Shipwreck from 1780

The deep, cold fresh waters of the Great Lakes seem to provide the best environment for the preservation of old shipwrecks. The latest example is the 1780 wreck of the British warship HMS Ontario recently found at the bottom of Lake Ontario. According to this report the ship is the oldest wreck ever found in the Great Lakes and is in an excellent state of preservation.

I thought this picture was kind of a teaser and have been looking for more. Let me know if you guys find any.

Older Dates

Now here's an odd one. Reports say that a 2,000 year-old date seed recovered from the famous archaeological site of Masada in Israel has successfully germinated. This breaks the old record for an old germinating seed previously held by a 700 year-old lotus seed recovered in China.

I have heard apocryphal stories of corn or beans recovered from Anasazi sites (probably about the age of the Chinese lotus seed) that have germinated, but haven't seen seen anything firm on it. There's certainly a lot of it around in cliff dwellings and dry caves.

Grease Rustlers

A couple of weeks ago, a post of mine mentioned in passing that demand for biofuels seems to be driving an increase in thefts of used kitchen grease in New York. Today's Denver Post notes the same phenomenon occurring here in Colorado.

In 2000, used fryer oil was trading for 7.6 cents per pound. Recently its price was about 33 cents a pound, or almost $2.50 a gallon.

Bird Update

They grow a lot in four weeks, don't they?

Sheep Herding

It has been snowing on Cat Urbigkit up in Wyoming (and Peculiar on the river in Utah) but it makes the steppes green.



The puppies are bonding with the sheep, and all is right with the world.

Links

A liberal university prof, female, decides to find out about guns and is both sane and fair, though some friends are predictably horrified. This is the fifth in a series and all are worth reading, as I suspect future installments will be, as is her regular non- gun blog, particularly good on reading and writing, here.

I particularly liked this. Professor Amitai Etzioni, who is anti- gun, alleges that the Second Amendment probably means what it says and thatwe shouldn't talk about it.

She replies, wryly: "UD finds Etzioni’s analogies — an individual in possession of a gun is a deadly virus, a nerve gas — as well as his aristocratic conviction that the possibly correct reading of one of our nation’s more important documents ought to be kept from ordinary American citizens, pretty stunning. But she’s grateful he wrote what he did, because he’s playing a role she wants to cast in this series — the typical college professor — with verve and candor."

HT Chas.

Once again: meat is good for you! HT Michael Blowhard.

Brilliant post by LabRat at Nerds that links up- to- date evo theory, optimum group size, envy, and what this says about Big State and taxes. Probably a PRINT and RTWT.

Dr H links to Reid's Pigeon Day post below with pics.

Amazing parasitoids affect behavior even more than we know (read Zimmer's Parasite Rex, linked to on the site.)

More Zimmer: what is a species?, "When it comes to wolves and coyotes, it is hard to say quite where one species stops and another starts. “We like to call it Canis soup,” says Bradley White of Trent University in Ontario." And he hasn't even gotten to bacteria yet...

Rebecca on biophilia and lizard bites.

A frog that apparently breaks its own bones to use as weapons. Glad that didn't come out on April first...

One very cool wine label. HT Sari Mantila.

HSUS Targets Tiny Non-research Universities in Pushover Campaign

At least, that's the idea.

Today's Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Humane Society of the United States has shifted the focus of its ongoing campaign to eliminate the use of animals in the nation's research institutions by encouraging smaller, teaching-based universities to sign pledges "not to subject any research animals to 'severe' unrelieved pain or distress."

So far, about a dozen have done so.

The Chronicle story by Jeffery Brainard includes the following quote:

"I said to myself, How could I not sign this and have a conscience?" says John
M. Carfora, director of sponsored research at Amherst. He said he hoped his
signature might influence researchers elsewhere to reflect anew on the necessity
of unrelieved pain in their laboratory animals.

With fewer than 1,700 students, the Amherst College research endeavor is probably not going to suffer much for Carfora's pledge. And that's precisely the point:

"...that is just what the advocacy group is counting on: a wave of no-fuss pledge signings that will put pressure on larger universities, which do conduct animal research, to follow suit."

"It's a place to start," says Kathleen M. Conlee, director of program management for animal-research issues at the group. "We will, over time, go up the ladder to those institutions in a different category."

Fair warning. Of course, HSUS and other groups have tried to reach that higher category before and been deterred. Turns out the major research institutions don't like being slandered or firebombed and rather quickly circle the wagons against these tactics.

This new approach, however, building a small-time 'coalition of the willing' with sweet talk and reasonable-sounding pledges, should fool no one. HSUS is still on its game: Extortion.

"The [HSUS pledge] attempts to strike a collegial approach—for example, the society offers to discuss with signatory institutions any instances of noncompliance it learns about and not to publicize them. That's a different approach from the picketing and vandalism that more-extreme activist groups have carried on at the University of California at Los Angeles and other campuses in a bid to end all animal testing (The Chronicle, April 18)."

In other words, "You sign our pledge and we'll look the other way when you break it. No smear campaigns, we promise. No harassment. No unfortunate accidents. But refuse to sign the pledge, and, well, who knows what might happen?"

Book Reviews

A Childhood by Harry Crews (also re-read: Florida Frenzy.)

Harry Crews is probably in his seventies, a professor of writing in Florida, and grew up among the rural poor of north Florida and southern Georgia.A Childhood is his memoir of that. Somebody in the NYTBR said that it is "..about a part of America that has rarely, except among books like this, been properly discovered." I am tempted to say "by NYT readers", but although hog butcherings, to give an instance, are not alien to me, Crew's world is just enough removed in space and time from us to have a mythic quality. It is a world of stoicism and bleak poetry, where one can be hexed by spitting birds or witness a suicide by knife.Crews' world does not have the nightmarish hillbilly Gothic and Biblical cadences of early Cormac McCarthy-- his is a simpler, harder prose. I like both, but I never said of McCarthy "this is how it was."

Florida Frenzy is a collection of essays by Crews, many published in Esquire in the seventies, and a few excerpts, including one from The Hawk is Dying, a movie recently made into a film. Most haven't made the cut in previous collections, not because of any lack of quality but because they depict such activities as running fox with hounds, 'gator poaching, cockfighting, and even dogfighting, in unflinching prose. He doesn't so much defend them as to portray them as parts of the culture he belongs (belonged?) to, now fading but still worthy of a moment's attention. Who would ever have known that a fighting bull wags its tail?

And who would ever publish such today? ESQUIRE??

(Thanks to Matt.)

Wolves at our Door by J. P. S. Brown.

Wolves takes up the stories of Jim Kane and Aidan Martinillo, old Brown protagonists (Aidan of my favorite Brown book, Forests of the Night, on which I have blogged before) as they get caught up in the border wars of the early 21st century. This a is both a subtle and a violent book; Joe Brown is the most knowledgeable chronicler of the borderlands alive today, having ranched in both Arizona and the Sierra Madre, and he has little patience with easy slogans-- neither "Minutemen" nor WSJ free- traders will find much comfort in his portrait of an old, permeable border with a distinct culture of its own, under fire from a violent Sierra Madrean society warped in recent times by drugs and even terrorism. It would make a great movie (with heroic parts for old men-- the best Jim Kanes are dead but I'd take Sam Neill)-- but it is probably far too un- PC.

(Apropos of nothing-- Joe, who is in his eighties, used to smuggle cattle across the border with an old Magdalenian rancher whom I knew slightly. Joe told me a yarn about Fred's refusing to remove his boots in a bordello down there. When I read the book I asked his great granddaughter, who tends bar at the Spur, if this sounded right, and she said "That was Fred!")

Thanks to MDMNM of Sometimes Far Afield-- don't know at this point if you got me this one or his memoir The World in Pancho's Eye but I'll get to that one soon!

SF/ Alternate worlds: S. M Stirling's The Sunrise Lands. My favorite in the "Change" series (where advanced technology ceases to work) so far. But you must at least read Dies The Fire, the first novel in the first trilogy-- this is the first in a second-- to understand it. Libby is doing so and says it works. Actually all are varying degrees of good if you have the time, as is Stirling generally. I have one from another series on my wish list.

Natural History. First, Mean and Lowly Things by Kate Jackson, a book about doing herpetology amidst physically and culturally difficult conditions in the Congo. Isaac, who sent it, was not enamored of the book- I think her account of difficulties, including those inevitable ones that come of working with another culture, put him off. I liked it better, as I tend to do with such stuff. Though I am more prone to freezing than sweating, I have been there so to speak, one reason "difficulties" play such a large part in my own Eagle Dreams-- they inevitably DO. The old narratives passed them over for the most part, except for occasional breakouts like William Beebe's aside, in a caption about "The Shooter of Poison Arrows" in Pheasant Jungles, that he had shot and killed the Burmese crossbowman pictured a few nights later, for shooting into Beebe's camp with bad intent! Better the warts- and- all tales like this and -- soon-- Jamie James' Snake Charmer, in which our blog friend Chris Wemmer plays a small part, mediating between the egos of the protagonist, the late Joe Slowinski, and mammalogist Alan Rabinowitz, who apparently thinks he owns Burma's wildlife.

Chris also turned me on to the delightful The Soul of the Rhino by Hemanta Mishry, an account of the history of the conservation of the Indian rhino, especially in the Terai of Nepal, by a Nepali conservation biologist. It is subtitled "A Nepali Adventure with Kings and Elephant Drivers, Billionaires and Bureaucrats, Samans and Scientists, and the Indian Rhinoceros", which about sums it up. Most is fascinating, funny (often rudely), and gradually hopeful, but murder and politics intervene and the book ends on a dark note. Will the Maoists in power NOT do what Maoists have always done? I get the feeling Mishra is whistling in the dark a bit. Libby doesn't want to go back, and she loved no place better.

Dog Man by Martha Sherrill is a Zen Buddhist dog book (if one buys Gary Snyder's assertion that Buddha forbids nothing to the good hunter). It is the story of Morie Sawataishi, an old man who lives in the snowy mountains of Hokkaido and who is responsible for saving the old working type of Akita through the deprivations of that hard countryside through the war and after. It reminds me of Asian poetry and ink calligraphy and the photos that Life magazine ran of hawking in the snow there in the sixties. It is also a favorite of the Atomic Nerds, who know their way around Akitas.

Though David Zincavage may not be a Dino man he knows I am, and sent Feathered Dragons: Studies in the Transition from Dinosaurs to birds. Lots of good Dino- wonk stuff-- think Tet Zoo but by more contributors. My favorites were a paper hypothesizing that flight feathers may have evolved as features for brooding, illustrated by many photos of modern birds and diagrams of such fossils as Oviraptor, and a paper by the too -elusive Robert Bakker improbably titled "Dinosaur Crime Scene Evaluations: Theropod Behavior at Como Bluff, Wyoming, and the Evolution of Birdness", complete with his inimitable illos. More Bakker please!

More to come...

Apologies

... for non- existent bloggage. I have been busy, ill, overextended, and probably depressed, though too much A, B, and C to take notice. I am involved in a lawsuit over last year's work (if it is ever resolved it will be a splendid tale for Michael Blowhard's critiques of modern publishing); am trying to get over a 6- month persistent antibiotic- resistant sinus infection, going to physical therapy for my arthritis in my hip and back when I can. I am trying to write the new book and convince my agent that a book combining travel, dogs, and science is viable. I am dealing with a difficult hawk (Gos) and a demanding but delightful one (baby, "Shunkar".) All this and not sleeping much. Though this is not a self - baring blog (or maybe I am not a person comfortable with such?) I feel a bit of explanation is in order!

I need to get working here, though. I have reviews, links, and photos that need exposition. There are so many reviews they may not be long but I will try to at least convey essence. Then maybe later ones will get back to length again...

Happy National Pigeon Day

Who knew?

The Atlantic: Is Google Making Us Stoopid?

This article by Nicholas Carr in the current Atlantic Monthly has been engendering a fair amount of discussion around the web, mostly centering on the following passages:

"Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. "

snip

"For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon."

I flit about the internets about as much as anyone, but I can't personally say that I have experienced the phenomenon that Carr describes. I read as many books as I ever have and still keep a large number of books going at the same time. This is a habit Steve and I share that we have discussed here a number of times and something I've done since I learned to read. I've also always been a fast reader. In high school, I dropped out of a speed-reading class when I found my own "system" already had me reading at speeds they were trying to teach.

The only change I can really see in my reading habits is that I have an increasing tendency to read non-fiction in a non-linear fashion. I read lots of history and find I often jump into sections of books that I find most interesting and then will back-track to fill in context if I need it. Sometimes I find I have read almost an entire book with the chapters in reverse order.

I have been seeing this as something positive and feeling that I am reading more efficiently - digging out data I want more quickly than plodding from pages 1 to n. It hadn't occurred to me that this might be an "internet effect" if indeed it is.

I've been wondering how the people who hang out here at the Querencia blog feel about this. Do you believe the internet is changing the way you read and "remapping" your circuitry?

Consolation for Pluto

Most of you probably remember the Sturm und Drang a couple of years ago when the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto from the status of a true planet. Steve even commented on a resolution introduced in the California legislature (you can always count on them!) condemning the demotion as it would cause "psychological harm to some Californians who question their place in the universe and worry about the instability of universal constants."

Well recently the IAU has come up with a new term for "small, nearly spherical objects orbiting beyond Neptune": plutoids. Naming a new class of dwarf planets after Pluto ought to make everyone feel better, don't you think?

Nah. Some critics of the IAU remain unappeased: "It's just some people in a smoke-filled room who dreamed it up," ......... "Plutoids or haemorrhoids, whatever they call it. This is irrelevant."

Personally, I was never that concerned about the IAU's decision in 2006 as it brought the structure of Gustav Holst's orchestral suite, The Planets, back in line with reality.

Friday Feeder Friend

Eurasian collared dove. This bird was new to me, but the species is apparently spreading throughout the continental US at a very fast pace. Steve and I were discussing them a few weeks back, and he said that these doves had gone from absent to the most common bird in Magdalena in the space of ten years. Accustomed as I am to mourning doves, these guys make a very undove-like squawk at times.

More From the California Legislature

Introduced in the Assembly, AB 2233 adds a section to the State Vehicle Code that states:

A person shall not drive a motor vehicle while holding a live animal in his or her arm or arms, or upon his or her lap.

Another Darwin Award Nominee

Inglewood man recovering after he's bitten by rattlesnake he picked up.

The man was bitten twice at Edward Vincent Park by a snake he thought was harmless

Was Napoleon Poisoned?

I've always found this story interesting and my recollection was that the preponderance of evidence indicated that he had been poisoned. But a new analysis of clippings of his hair done by Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics has evidence that points in the other direction:

"They conducted a detailed analysis of hairs taken from Napoleon’s head at four times in his life — as a boy in Corsica, during his exile on the island of Elba, the day he died on St. Helena, at age 51, and the day afterward — and discovered that the arsenic levels underwent no significant rises.

Casting a wide net, the scientists also studied hairs from his son, Napoleon II, and his wife, Empress Josephine. Here, too, they found that the arsenic levels were similar and uniformly high.

The big surprise was that the old levels were roughly 100 times the readings that the scientists obtained for comparison from the hairs of living people.
“The concentrations of arsenic in the hair taken from Napoleon after his death were much higher,” the scientists wrote. But the levels were “quite comparable with that found not only in the hair of the emperor in other periods of his life, but also in those of his son and first wife.”

The results, they added, “undoubtedly reveal a chronic exposure that we believe can be simply attributed to environmental factors, unfortunately no longer easily identifiable, or habits involving food and therapeutics.”

So he had high levels of arsenic in his system, but so did everyone else. All sorts of things we know are toxic now (like mercury !) were used as medicines or in industrial processes back then.

I'll have to qualify my opening sentence to say that I've never been that interested in Napoleon as an individual, but find the era of the Napoleonic Wars fascinating. Read too many C.S. Forester, Patrick O'Brian and Bernard Cornwell novels, I guess.

Fisher Populations Rebound

To the consternation of some suburbanites. I must admit I have never seen one. Spooky picture, huh?

A Unicorn lives in Tuscany

According to the Telegraph.

New book, blog

Read any books written by your neighbors?

I just finished "A Year Without 'Made in China': One Family's True Life Adventure in the Global Economy" by Sara Bongiorni, a freelance journalist who also lives in Baton Rouge. The book was a gift from another neighbor, who I believe bought it from the author in a local signing.

Bongiorni's book details her personal quest, shared by default by her husband and their two small children, to eschew any purchase stamped "Made In China." For a year. Ouch!

It isn't long before the worm turns on what seems like an attractive and not-impossible idea. Within a month, it's clear to all that virtually every readily-purchased and affordable consumer good is manufactured in the People's Republic. Eleven long months to go...

Along the way we learn about the many unexpected dilemmas and near-emergencies that must arise from such a project. The result is an ongoing negotiation of amendments to the embargo that make clear just how closely our lives have melded with the ways and means of the next world superpower.

It's a good read, funny and fast. Prepare to be hammered with a reminder how bourgeoisie you've become.

Considering the size of our town and the percentage of residents with some association to LSU (Bongioni's husband teaches), it's not surprising that I recognize some of the local personalities and places, however veiled by the author. One named outright in the acknowledgements is my friend, also a freelance writer and former LSU staffer, Renee Bacher.

Renee and her family are traipsing across Europe just now, learning the value of the US dollar. She just sent me the link to her blog, here, and I recommend it to you. A section from today's update:

We spend three nights in Helsinki, jammed into the chestnut sized room with our three children. On the first night, I think that Benny is going to blow. The fight is with Hannah, over a coveted pillow that belongs to Laura (of course, inflatable ones I have brought along for each of us are inadequate replacements during this fight. It is in the next fight, my fight with Hannah, that we fight over these).

My main concern is that the way-too-kind Finnish cousin and her boyfriend (who I can’t believe is not leaving her over us) will hear the ruckus, from their pea sized room next door. Okay, that’s not exactly true. My main concern is that they will see that Ed and I are complete failures as parents.

But worse still is my concern that my inconsiderate, bickering children will confirm the stereotype that all American children are spoiled brats. Here Laura and Oscar have graciously surrendered 9/10 of their apartment to us along with 100% of their privacy, but neither Hannah nor Ben is willing to surrender one stinking pillow for the common good.

Ban Mylar Balloons

I saw this offbeat op-ed in today's LA Times that calls for the banning of mylar balloons in California as they can short out power lines and cause black-outs. The author, a state senator who introduced a bill to this effect, says Southern California Edison claims there were 470 black-outs in its service area caused by these metallic balloons last year.

Sounds like a typical California nanny-state measure, but maybe the facts really are on the banners' side.

The op-ed struck a chord with me however, as we found the carcasses of hundreds of balloons (mylar and other) on our recent survey in the Imperial Valley. I started calling the project area the "balloon graveyard". You can see two proud crew members with a bumble-bee balloon above.

Tracing Humanity's Path

I just stumbled across this article that came out a couple of weeks ago, describing a statistical modeling study using genomic evidence that attempts to map how our species spread from Africa to populate the rest of the world. I'm really surprised this hasn't gotten more play in the press.


What I found most interesting (from my parochial point of view) was what it had to say about the peopling of the New World:

"The team also found that North and South America were colonized independently by at least two different waves of migration from different parts of Asia, although both waves appear to have arrived via the Bering Strait. This conclusion contradicts the conventional view, which postulates just one migratory wave out of Asia."

These results, if true, add more fuel to the ferment that Paleoindian studies is in and could conceivably support the coastal migration hypothesis we have discussed often here. I'll just restate the opinion I expressed in a post last fall:

"I believe it is starting to appear that the paradigm we have been using for he last 50 years or so, of a single overland migration across Beringia about 14,000 BP, is impossibly simplistic. I think future research will likely show that (as Valerius Geist believes) there were many attempts to colonize the Americas from Asia over a long period of time, both overland and down the coast in boats. We aren't recognizing or haven't found the inland sites and sites along the coast have been drowned by the Holocene rise in sea level.

There is all sorts of evidence that currently doesn't fit together very well. Mitochondrial DNA evidence from Native Americans seems to indicate a single migration of a small number of individuals. But the morphology of the earliest Paleoindian skeletons we have is distinctly different from modern Native Americans. A recent review of all the radiocarbon dates from all the Paleoindian sites in Alaska shows that the oldest sites there are younger than the oldest good dates from further south in North America. That doesn't seem to fit with a Beringian migration. Time and more research will tell. I think we'll see that Clovis was the latest and most successful colonizing attempt."

Prosthetic Beak

Didn't know if you had seen this interesting item last week about an injured bald eagle in a sanctuary in Idaho that is being fitted with a prosthetic beak. The final version will be made of titanium.

More on Isolated Tribes

John Noble Wilford has an expanded treatment on isolated primitive tribal groups that I briefly posted on last week. Apparently there are about 100 left, half of which are in Amazonia. Many of the rest are in Papua New Guinea.

As I said said before, it's astonishing to me that there are this many left at this late date.

More Pretties

I keep forgetting to put in a better pic of the Stephen Grant sidelever. So: ancient (1889) English Best gun, resting on a relatively modern kilim I picked up in Sanliurfa on the Kurdish tazi expedition,

Sunday Pix

On Sunday this time of the year we do a lot of stuff around the house, garden, with birds etc.



Patrick Porter of the Pigeon list (also a bird hunter, botanist, horticulturist, and damned good writer), sent Libby a bunch of huge Dahlia tubers. (Wish I had thought to show scale-- some of these are finger long.) We shall provide updates.

The Gos, who was molting loose in the mews, very suddenly developed a serious case of Demonic Mews Possession Syndrome. Sounds funny, but I don't care for a large well- armed bird hanging from my throat. Brought him into the house for retraining and he turned back into a pussycat-- here he is turning his head in the universal hawk greeting signal.



But having a hawk, as opposed to a falcon, in the house is always tough-- they excrete horizontally for one thing, and our poop catcher is not 100% reliable. And even the best hawk (as opposed again to falcon) is a nervous fidgety thing. So we built a screen perch for the mews and are feeding him out on the hawk lawn. Not sure if he cares for this but it is the best we can do.

Matt who flies Harrises as sweet as my falcon, is saying things like "Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Accipiters" and "They'll turn on you, you know!"

Meanwhile the baby falcon is a delight. Here he is with his favorite monster.

Third Anniversary

Rebecca's post about the fifth anniversary of her blog just reminded me to check that yesterday was the third anniversary of Querencia.

Marked-up Birds become Sexier

I was intrigued by this story in USA Today earlier this week and Chas beat me to getting a post up about it.

"Using a $5.99 marker, scientists darkened the rust-colored breast feathers of male New Jersey barn swallows, turning lighter birds to the level of those naturally darkest.

They had already found, in a test three years ago, that the marked-up males were more attractive to females and mated more often.

This time they found out that the more attractive appearance, at least in the bird world, triggered changes to the animals' body chemistry, increasing testosterone."

So in this case clothes do make the man. Make sure you read Chas' take on this.

Hidalgo Under My Skin

I found this article fascinating: a series of tourism ads that feature pictures of famous prehistoric ruins body-painted on the torso of a beautiful actress, has been found in violation of Mexican law.

"The country’s anthropology institute, based in Mexico City, does more than just serve as Mexico’s monument police. It oversees a vast collection of pyramids, shrines and other attractions, all more than a century old. With 800 researchers, the institute churns out academic treatises that seek to make sense of the country’s past. It also rejects anything seen as exploiting a historical artifact’s dignity."

I discussed this with an archaeology colleague who is a Mexican citizen who says it is fairly common for print ads and billboards that "trivialize" Mexican history to be banned like this. Brings a whole new perspective on the recurrent controversies on flag burning that happen in this country.

Peter Rabbit Must Die

I thought you'd all enjoy this unintentionally hilarious NYT piece on city folk who have moved to the country to bond with nature. But once they find out that wildlife treats their gardens as convenience stores they snap and turn into bloodthirsty killers. Some choice examples:

"The homeowner, a city-boy artist and illustrator who had moved to rural Pennsylvania, never wanted to kill the woodchucks. Sure, they were ruining the garden and digging up the foundations of outbuildings, but it was a moral issue: the artist, who is still so uncomfortable about what transpired — and so concerned about how his New York clients would feel about it that he is not willing to be identified — did not want to take a life."

snip

"Finally, the artist decided he would have to shoot the animals. First, though, he went to each hole and made an announcement.

“I said: ‘I intend to kill you. You have 24 hours to get out,’ ” he recalls. “I wanted to give them fair warning. I said, ‘If I were you, I would find another place to live.’ I also promised them I would not take a shot unless I knew it would be fatal.”

snip

"Eventually, though, he embraced his mission, and grew so obsessed with it that an aunt began to call him Woodchuck Johnny. How many did he kill that summer?

“I stopped at 19,” he says. “One was a suicide. It realized its days were numbered and ran in front of a car.”

Or:

"Five years ago there were serious animal problems at the community garden — black bear, deer, beaver — but “the worst pest of all was the porcupine,” Ms. Williams says. “The kindhearted would trap them and drive them 10 or 15 miles away, until one of the forest people said they just came back.”

snip

“So finally, four years ago, we put an electric fence all around this big field, but the porcupines then decide to burrow under the fence,” she says. “They’re ingenious. So we had to put rocks down and pour cement.”

Even then, a porcupine managed to get in. And when she saw it, “strolling along, munching away,” she could stand no more.

“He was after my carrot crop,” she explains. “I said, I just cannot handle this anymore. He sees me and tries to wander off, but they can’t run very fast. I got him with the sledgehammer. He tried to dodge me, but I got him on the head.”

Friday Feeder Friend

I'm halfway cheating with this picture of a Gambel's quail. I took it at a feeder in the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge in California.

It reminded me of this quail petroglyph from El Morro National Monument in New Mexico.

Mongol Tazi

Andrew Campbell of The Regal Viszla just sent this ink drawing of a Mongolian hunter with a tazi-- reinforcing once more that they are most anciently an Asian dog.

Feathered Dinos

Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origin of Birds-- the best book on the subject yet, by Australian paleontologist John Long and magical artist Peter Schouten, best known here for his collaborations with Tim Flannery. You look at these and think: THIS is what they looked like.



A mother Troodon attends the hatching of her eggs. Much behavior here-- not just predation but courting, brooding, and more. (Forgive slightly cropped image-- I didn't want to break the binding.)

The book is not yet available here or in the UK-- it will be at least six months. But you can order it from Andrew Isles in Australia (it is well worth getting on his list anyway) and he'll have it to you directly.

Young Hawker

The cover of the Georgia Fish & Game brochure for this year. As Anne Pearse Hocker says, no "Nature Deficit Syndrome" here!

Bo Diddley RIP

Coming back from a sort of bloggish lunch in Albuquerque with frequent commentors and dog- in- laws Paul and Nate, MDMNM of Sometimes Far Afield, his friend Amelia, and a baby hawk, we saw that the flags on the State Police hq near Socorro were at half mast.

Turns out the great old rocker Bo Diddley was dead at 79. One thing that most people don't know is that in the seventies he was a deputy sheriff in Los Lunas, which you can read about here. At that time he gave three patrol cars to the Highway Patrol, which may well be why they remember him. Ted Bakewell (see post here, more notorious for our haircuts, for a note on his uncle Father Anderson Bakewell) is now a St. Louis businessman but in his time was a roommate of Jimmy Page (of the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin)in London, and a New Mexico musician, and remembers jamming with Bo Diddley in his trailer in the Valley when Bo was a NM lawman.

For a good YouTube of Bo Diddley playing "Mona" go here. I couldn't find one of my favorite, "Who do you love?"

UPDATE: Margory just sent this link to "Who do you love?"- on vinyl!

Summer Reading for Presidential Hopefuls

Tip o' the hat to Annie Hocker (world traveller, photographer, falconer, writer) for this link to a list of books other writers suggest for each of the presidential candidates.

How many have you read?

Not many by me, but some, and I'm happy to say my main man Wendell Berry is suggested twice (once by Barbara Kingsolver and again by Michael Pollan).

First Kingsolver:

"...They could finish with any novel by Wendell Berry. (My favorite is “Jayber Crow.”) While the farmlands and rural towns of our nation are mostly overlooked, it’s worth remembering that many people still live in them, retaining skills of self-sufficiency and neighborly cooperation that wait to be valued in the world to come."


Then Pollan:

"I would urge the three presidential candidates to read — or reread — two books from the 1970s that could help them confront the deepening (and now deeply intertwined) problem of our food and energy economies. Long before either climate change or the obesity epidemic were on the national scope, Wendell Berry’s “Unsettling of America” made the case for a way of life and a kind of agriculture that might have averted both — and could still make an important contribution to solving these problems. In “Diet for a Small Planet,” Frances Moore Lappé shone a light on the wastefulness and environmental costs of meat-eating, predicting that humanity’s growing appetite for meat would lead to hunger for the world’s poor. Together these two visionary writers — who fell out of favor during the cheap-food and cheap-energy years that began in the ’80s and are just now coming to a calamitous close — still have much to say about the way out of our current predicament."

I've read both "Unsettling of America" and "Jaber Crow" and will get around to reading them again, as I am now Berry's short yet comprehensive tragedy, "The Memory of Old Jack." A favorite.

"Unsettling" was a challenging read for me. I think I was too early in my exploration of W.B. and too quickly come from his shorter collections of essays. It's unabridged and unsympathetic Berry when I was accustomed to being lead more gently into his agrarian worldview.

Prompted by my constant boosterism of Berry, my father read Unsettling first and it nearly did him in. Dad is a grown farm boy from West Texas but was raised farming commodities on land already converted, fenceline to fenceline, to the kind of industrial use Berry rails against. But Dad broke horses, too, and loves hard work and his rural country roots. I suggested a diet of short novels, the Port William chronicles, as easier plowing.

Jaber Crow is the story of a small town barber and a bachelor whose life spans the divide between what Berry sees as the older way and the new one, two eras split more or less by the second world war. Like The Memory of Old Jack, Jaber Crow has elements of tragedy---small personal ones but all of them underwritten by the greater tragedy of (what was then) the coming age.

Should all the president's men and women read Wendell Berry? I've always thought so. I've wondered often how it is that none mention him in passing or even nod to his general themes. Would a single quote be too dangerous? What would the media make of it if someone once claimed Wendell Berry as his or her "spiritual advisor?"