Frederic

Peculiar sends a link to the latest-- there always seems to be news-- on Emperor Frederic the Second (1194- 1250), of Sicily and the Holy Roman Empire (which wits will still tell you was none of the three)...

I have been trying unsuccessfully for years to sell a book on Frederic and his surviving relics like the amazing Castel del Monte (good book here). It might begin thus:

"Born a German Emperor in Sicily, to a mother nearly 50 years old; raised a street kid in Palermo, reclaimed his heritage at 16; feuded with popes, was excommunicated (often); made a reluctant crusade that ended in a mosque, shaking hands with Saladin and discussing falconry; died at 57 of malaria; left only an Italian Moslem town that survived him for less than a century, a son who was soon to die defending his cause and bloodline, a strange castle in Puglia , and a book of advanced science and art in the form of a hunting manual , The Art of Hunting with Birds.

“He was reputed in his lifetime to be the Antichrist, and was known as Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World. Dante, of the opposing political party, wrote him into Hell.

“The Nazis liked him for maintaining power as a northerner among Mediterraneans, despite his keeping a court of Jews, Moslems, and heretical troubadors, maintaining a beacon of rational tolerance in a time with little enough of that. Also despite the fact that his leading historian was the Jewish Ernst Kantorowicz, who they exiled (he ended up teaching at Berkeley).

“He defeated a Moslem guerilla army in Sicily , then made them into a kind of mercenary guard, settling them in the walled city of Lucera on the mainland and building them a mosque. He tempted St. Francis of Assisi with naked dancing girls. He was reputed to have experimented on humans, raising children without speaking to see what tongue they spoke, weighing bodies before and after death to attempt to discover the weight of the soul. As in his falconry manual, he was, perhaps to an excessive degree, the first anti – Aristotelian empiricist.

“When the opened his tomb not long ago they found he was sharing his tomb with an unknown young woman. Today he is remembered mostly by falconers, Sicilian patriots, and perhaps the Mafia, which some legends say started as a local patriotic society, fighting occupying forces and landlords in his memory.”

The in- print translation of his de Arte Venandi cum Avibus will be in my "book of books". And Vadim Gorbatov has painted him, more than once.

"Big Eli's" Monument

In a beautiful spot on his family ranch in central Montana. With sighthounds!

Guns vs Spells

From Peculiar who writes:

"I've often thought that aspects of the Harry Potter epic would have been improved by this approach...."


Also check his blog link to an artist who has drawn The Call of Chthulhu in the style of Dr Suess, including rhyming text-- brilliant! As he says, "We have an infant who will soon need it!"

Granddogs & others

More running dogs...

Dan Gauss writes to tell us his Galgo girl has just given birth to a pup with Lashyn AND Plummer lurcher on the paternal side.

UPDATE:

"Department of corrections: re: grandogs. It's just the opposite. Galgo *boy* sired litter of uno. Plummer and Lashyn are on the *maternal* side. A singleton, born on my mother's birthday could only be named: H1LDA ;) I was trying to rustle up some pics of the parents and got sidetracked."

Grandparents in their youth:

Meanwhile John B's inimitable Tigger (Lashyn X Kyran) in California continues to be a serious performer despite the opposition of breed purist Nazis...

Links, Pix, & Assorted Phenomena...

Lauren's Aquiling is up and running again and, at least until her book on her year among the Kazakhs is out, the best place for exotic falconry and adventure tales...


There is some pretty funny and often grotesque animal photography up at Nature Wants to Eat You. HT Annie Davidson, who also sent this video of a walking octopus.

Tim Gallagher, who recently completed a book on his harrowing expedition to the heart of the Narcotraficante strongholds of the Sierra Madre in search of the (almost?) extinct Imperial woodpecker, wrote the short version here, and added a link to the only videos of this largest of all woodpeckers...

Dr Joseph Rock explored the remotest parts of central Asia and southwestern China for the National Geographic in the twenties and thirties. Teddy Roosevelt's big- game hunting sons thought Minya Konka in "his" territory near the border of Szechuan and Tibet-- he wrote about in in 1930-- was higher than Everest. A couple more Americans laid siege to it in 1935 (they were also hunters, armed with a Springfield .30- 06 and two "heavy" SMLE's) and found it was formidable but not quite that high. Yvon Chouinard, Al Read, Kim Schmitz, Rick Ridgeway, and Harry Frishman (Peculiar's biological dad) made another attempt on it in 1980, not long before Harry was killed in a climb in his "backyard" Tetons, but they ran into disaster. Bruce Chatwin allegedly caught the legendary "bat fungus" that did in his AIDS- compromised body in a cave in the vicinity, which is also home to the Naxi people and their still- living goshawk falconry. (Chatwin also put Rock's book, and Emperor Frederic II's falconry text de Arte Venandi cum Avibus, into his posthumous story "The Estate of Maximilian Tod").

Obviously there is a book there, and eventually I hope to go, with Lib and Peculiar. Meanwhile I suspect the greatest single source of useful material is at the Arnold Arboretum near Boston, where Rock's archives reside, full of treasures like this photo:

("Horned Rifles" too!)

Fat Horses

Large- mammal and Pleistocene maven Valerius Geist thinks more is going on with the spotted horse cave paintings below than just realism-- be cites their exaggerated fatness as well:

"Horses in top condition thus have a large gut-fill, expanded further by storage fat about intestines and omentum. Consequently, the belly bulges downward. Simultaneously, the fat stored on the rump and haunches generates rounded rump and haunch contours. Because of the hanging belly, at a distance, fat animals appear short-legged. To signal the wish for a fat horse the artist sketches or paints horses with very large haunches, bulging bellies and very short legs. To this may be added atlatl darts or throwing spear arching towards or stuck in the horses vitals. The image is totally non-representational. No artist ever saw a horse like the one painted in Lascaux Cave, illustrating Rosner's article. However, the artists skillful exaggerations generated meaningful symbolism: may spears kill for you a fat mare."

This struck fire with me as Mongolian artists STILL portray even ridden horses as fat. Two examples from my own collection (one with dog a present from Andrew Campbell) below:


Of course the actual horses are chunky too: an "Appy" from Olgii:

Val wrote back:
"Wow! thank you so much for this note and images. Indeed the horses look "delectable". I am still investigating, but it appears horse fat has a multiple of the omega-3 content of ruminant fats. That's brain-building fat! Nice to see the spotted coats. As to leg-placement, it's wrong- alas!"

Hawk Trapping

Leonardo Trujillo, a new falconer and friend of my apprentice Gary Moody, just trapped his first redtail "Rojo". He may find that such "getting ready games" (term from Bil Gilbert) are almost as addictive as falconry itself. Meanwhile, congratulations!

Grandparently stuff

Eli's Baptism in Santa Fe two weekends ago. With this and a Tom Russell concert and deadlines and trying to get Momo going and editing-- BUSY!
Eli and doting grandma:

Niki and Eli, Jack too...


The ceremony, us behind:

Lib with Jenny French, one of my oldest friends in duration if not age, beaming on what she calls the "Beebums":

Thanksgiving Goats

Our daughter, her husband and our granddaughter were here to visit during the Thanksgiving holiday. I took this picture during one of our field trips while they were here. Bella seems to have decided she likes goats, at least these three sweet Dwarf Nubian does owned by one of our friends. She had a good time feeding them peanuts.

Hope you had a nice Thanksgiving.

Corrected - Nigerian.

Poem

Hurt Hawks

I

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat,
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.
The curs of the day come and torment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

II

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight.What fell was relaxed,
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

- Robinson Jeffers

Hot Links

Enjoy this run-down on Ten Huge Prehistoric Cats. That's an American lion in the pic.

Someone tries to rob the wrong Denny's in Houston.

Anthropologists at the NY Times discover the use of man camps for construction and operation of projects in remote areas of the West. Many of the projects I'm involved with permitting plan on using these. In fact, we may have a project next year where we have to set one up ourselves.

Here's an interesting article containing a series of interviews with author Jim Harrison, who has a new novel out. My favorite line from the article: “You’re from Escanaba. Shouldn’t you know what a pheasant looks like?”

For the first time in a long time, more people are moving out of California than are moving in. I can relate.

Apology on Poems

I was just looking at the last two poems I put into posts and just wanted to apologize for the hash Blogger makes of my attempts at formatting. I don't seem to be able to do a lot more than get the line breaks and stanzas correct. I assure you the words are all there.

Poem

The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!


Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!


No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.


- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hot Links

This piece on dinosaur feathers preserved in amber came out in September, but I just now stumbled across it. Pretty amazing photo gallery.

Anthropologists from the NY Times Style section have discovered that portable generators can become status symbols in certain primitive societies - such as their own during a power outage.

This story tells how a reanalysis of human fossils originally excavated in 1964, has established that they are the oldest known skeletal remains of anatomically modern humans in the whole of Europe. It's amazing what you can figure out re-examining old collections. This post I put up a few weeks ago describes the reanalysis of a mastodon kill excavated thirty years ago that has established it as Pre-Clovis in age. It's taken us about 100 years to figure out how the Antikythera Mechanism worked. There's a reason we curate this stuff in museums.

Here is a beautiful photo gallery of The Forest of the Ancients - a bristlecone pine grove that contains the oldest living things on the planet.

Bronze Artifact from Prehistoric Site in Alaska

The Associated Press has this report on a cast bronze artifact discovered this summer during the excavation of a prehistoric Eskimo site on the Seward Peninsula of Alaska. This article isn't written very clearly, but it appears that the artifact was found in fill outside of, or possibly below, a prehistoric house that was being excavated. A radiocarbon assay taken from a piece of leather wrapped around the artifact gave a date of AD 600.

Prehistoric Eskimo as well as many North American Indian groups, are known to have made artifacts from native copper, but using casting techniques for alloys like bronze has never been seen before. This buckle or piece of harness or whatever it is, most likely was made in China or Korea and somehow made its way across the Bering Strait. I would imagine some analysis of trace elements in the alloy will give a better idea of its origin.

Pretty cool.

UPDATE

I complained in the original post that I thought the AP article was poorly written. Please take a look at this press release and interview from the University of Colorado that makes what's going on at that site much clearer.

Huevos

One of our colleagues at work lives in an even more rural part of Douglas County than we do. In an effort to keep her agricultural property tax rate, last summer she started raising chickens and goats. The goats are milk goats and we haven't seen anything from them yet. However, we are glad to do our part to help her with her tax issues by buying eggs. If you compare these with eggs you'd buy at a supermarket you wouldn't know they came from the same species. She has a fairly wide variety of chickens and guarantees at least one green egg per dozen. The white eggs in this dozen come from Polish White Crested Black hens. As the white eggs are a bit smaller, we got another as lagniappe.

Buzzard Roost

After posting the Robinson Jeffers poem Vulture earlier in the week, I remembered some pictures I took early this year. Back in January we were doing some field work in the desert near Blythe, California. In town one morning, I saw about 30-40 turkey vultures using a large eucalyptus tree as a roost.
The temperature was in the high 30s - just about as cold as it ever gets in Blythe. This flock was about as cold, huddled-up and miserable-looking group of birds as I have ever seen, accustomed as they were to the 100+ degree temperatures here most of the year.

Finally, as the sun rays hit more directly, a few starting spreading their wings to catch the heat, as turkey vultures are wont to do.

Sporting Miscellany

As the Peculiars are here with grandbaby Eli I shall continue my slackerish blog- sloth for a bit more, but I have harvested a number of cool images to share. So with no further ado:

Colonel Charles Askins was a more ambiguous character than the other Golden Age gunwriters; he once described himself as a "sociopath". Charlie Waterman once told me that he was the only evil person he ever met, and his darker side shows in the character based on him in Stephen Hunter's Pale Horse Coming. On the other hand, he was endlessly kind to a friend of mine who grew up in San Antone (where he spent his retirement), when Mark was a child.

And he had great taste in guns. I have coveted this baroque monster of a ten- bore, best- quality AyA since I first read of it in the Seventies and now it is up for sale, unfortunately with an estimate of over $20,000! Somewhere there also exists its companion, a sidelock over- and- under that may be the only one ever built in ten...




We have seen blog- friend and all- 'round sportsman (pointers, falcons, fine guns, even Spanish pouters!) Daniel's dogs and hawks here before. Here he is (on the big gray) at a field trail with pointer Ferd-- and I think that is fellow blogger Mike Spies on the ground...


Berkutchi Lauren McGough*, who we are proposing as a Fellow for the Explorers Club, is going for her PhD in Central Asia. Meanwhile she has added deerstalking in Scotland to her skill set. Here she is with her first quarry and a very "Euro" setup-- a suppressed Tikka .25- 06 with a Swarovski scope (Jonathan Hanson: "Why do Americans consider suppressors 'evil' rather than polite?")

You can vote for her in a "Hunt of a Lifetime" competition here.



Finally, also courtesy of Lauren, the "Eternal Team" in Turkmenistan:


* Lauren can make me feel older than being a grandfather does-- she is 24, born several months after Betsy Huntington died!

Hot Links

This rather amazing photo comes from an article describing rhino translocations in South Africa using helicopters. From one of the pictures it looks like they are just using a Huey to do this - I would have thought it would have required a stouter helo.

It's too soon to tell how the ouster of Kadafi (Kadhafi? Gaddafi? Qaddafi?) will play out politicially for the people of Libya. But this article says archaeological research there may benefit.

Here are nine things you need to know about North Dakota. I may be mistaken, but I don't think I saw pheasants mentioned once.

Does this country really need a Christmas Tree Tax?

Asteroid 2005 YU55 just missed us.

Poem

Vulture

I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling
high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit
narrowing,
I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-
feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, "My dear bird, we are wasting time
here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you." But how
beautiful
he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the
sea-light
over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak
and
become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes--
What a sublime end of one's body, what and enskyment; what a life
after death.

- Robinson Jeffers

Spotted Horses in Paleolithic Art

I really enjoyed this article in the NY Times about horses in Pleistocene cave art. From what I have seen in the literature, most researchers seem to believe that animals represented in Eurasian cave art are accurate depictions of the animals living in our ancestors' environment. For example, in The Nature of Paleolithic Art, Dale Guthrie uses information from cave art to produce maps that plot variation in coat color and marking patterns for various species.

One group of researchers however, believed that some animals represented may be more symbolic, diverging from reality or representing rare or even mystical creatures. Among these possible symbolic creatures were spotted horses, well known from Pech-Merle Cave.

The article tells us that recent DNA analysis has shown though, that Pleistocene horses had three color patterns: spotted or dappled; blackish ones; and brown ones. And these are the patterns that appear in cave art. People were drawing horses they actually saw - not "spirit horses."

So there is another vote for research like Guthrie's, assuming these are accurate representations of nature in the Pleistocene.

Also though, being a Faulkner fan, I was reminded of his novella entitled Spotted Horses.

Running Dogs

Herb Wells of Alpaugh CA takes the most amazing photos of coursing dogs I have ever seen- probably that anyone has.

A couple of sets here. The first three pics demonstrate the incredible and totally normal hyperextension and flexing of a running dog's first joints (third is also one of out own breeding, Daniela's Shunkar). This is also why you should not remove dewclaws.



Second batch: synchronized dogging. Is this common?!

Lame excuses and photo posts

Apparently finishing the eagle book meant MORE work- I have totally reorganized the library and am organizing book selling, wood heating, the next book, and getting Momo aloft. Which leaves precious little time to blog (yet).

But on the principle that everybody likes bookshelves pix here are a few shots of the "new" library. I will follow with some other (more?) interesting photos.

Clicking these ones to enlarge should resolve some titles for the curious...