Christina's Blog

Another post I have been kicking down the road: my friend Christina Nealson's blog. I kept trying to think of original ways to describe her vivid writing and books, her nomadic life, her heterodox feminism and her support of the Second Amendment...

Finally I thought: why not just let her describe her visit? Come back soon, Christina! Her blog is now officially on the roll.

Pigeons vs Humaniacs

Chris Landauer of Border Wars sent me a note a couple of weeks ago on the ARista's war on pigeon racing. Since then I have been roaming the Internet, too busy and too pissed off to to write a calm essay on the kind of people who would persecute old men, some of them who have made real connections to youngsters of different cultures, for being "racketeers" for betting on races. They claim it is cruel because some don't make it home (they don't know most ferals are more homer than not), and that some substandard birds are "culled" (and eaten), a practice and term that they seem to think unique to pigeon keepers....

It would of course be easy to sue the sport out of existence, of course; though the Queen of England and some wealthy Belgians fly birds,  the old working class cartoon character Andy Capp on the other side of the channel and ancient ethnics like my late grandfather in the US are more typical, as are young blacks and city Hispanos. And given its nature as a HOMING sport, its targets are stationary, unable to go underground. Add irrational fears of diseases that pigeons don't even carry, the latest being bird flu...

And then I thought, to hell with reasoned arguments; better to go with my initial reaction. So here are some of the calmer parts of my reaction to Chris...

"God, Chris, I get so sick of it all.

" 'It's so crooool, but they are all old and they're going to die soon so we'll LET them'...

"And another human- animal hybrid culture, another meme, another selected association of unique genes goes back into the undifferentiated pond; another joy is taken from us, there is one less thing to distract the young from the all- flattening difference- ending locale- killing biophobic Almighty Screen. How many youths in how many places once took baskets of pigeons miles to 'toss' and raced them home, as I did? No more pigeons, hunting dogs, ferrets, horses but for the rich, ratting, snake catching. Oddly my grandson probably WILL do many of these, but will he be a social outcast for it? And WHERE will he do it?

"And me- my salukimorphs are wanted, and my hawks. But who will pick up my unique genetic stream and crosses when I am gone, my wild hawk- evading homers, my crossbred and reconstructed old Spanish pouter breeds? Eli is too young, and his parents still live in the city; US cities are banning them outright by name (Chicago, Bozeman) or just making it  virtually impossible to keep or God help us FLY them.

"No answers but... Pigeon racing CRUEL? What absolute bullshit. The only beings that never suffer are-- DEAD."

A last thought: vegetarian and fine writer Sy Montgomery, who wrote beautifully about them in Birdology, knows better, and has more wise biophilia in her little finger than all of HSUS...

Photos from Scotland and Turkey, where pigeon culture still not only exists but thrives. The last pix including the cupboard loft are in the restaurant in Urfa where I used to eat lunch.

Guadalupe

Tom Russell's song from "Blood and Candle Smoke", sung by Gretchen Peters, and Guadalupe herself, painted by Tom. You can see his paintings, including I believe the original of this print, at Rainbow Man gallery in Santa Fe. He began last week's show with this haunting song.

We do have an oddly eclectic "collection"-- she is flanked by Gorbatov's painting of quail on Lee Henderson's ranch, just east of town, and Jonathan Kingdon's aardwolf, with photos of Eli and Betsy and a bronze of a harrier by Loffler below-- not to mention our metal dachshund.

True Biologist Cartoon

Courtesy of John Wilson... double or right click to enlarge.

Blast from the past

Picture of Lib and dog Ruch in the Escalante in '73, when she used to walk to Everest Base Camp...

Wilson Photos

Relative newcomers John and Carolyn Wilson are becoming serious documenters of the phenology of local wildlife and photographers of same (with real lenses). They supply constant water on their forest- edge holding 12 miles from town, which has already paid off in photos of bandtail pigeon and goshawk. Now John has gotten a good portrait of a Lewis's woodpecker. They are odd birds, not very common and living an un- woodpecker- like "lifestyle" between that of a flicker and a flycatcher; I have mostly seen them in pasture country, sitting on wires and hawking flying insects.

The other interesting recent one needs explanation. Our favorite town birding spot or at least the most productive is what we call "Lake Magdalena", the sewage pond just to our north. Every water- loving migrant that passes seems to find it; I have seen white pelicans among other things. It is especially attractive to ducks; the late Floyd Mansell once drove me out to see something but would not tell me what until I had seen for myself. On the pond were about ten black scoters, salt- water ducks I had last seen in the winter surf off Duxbury Beach in Massachusetts. "I didn't want to tell you because if they had left you might not have believed it".

On this photo the old Magdalena Cemetery, where Floyd and other friends rest, is at the top, the "lake" below, graced with a flock of white- faced glassy ibises. Double or right- click to enlarge.

George Jones: 1933- 2013

A great country singer died today. This photo of him in the 70's in NYC pre- dates photoshop.

Andy Warhol, George, Tom Russell:

George Jones, R.I.P.

Quote

"... as soon as I went in the door I immediately recalled how great an experience a good bookstore was, to which the browsing we do on computers is as phone sex compared to sex."-- Michael Gruber

Passenger Pigeons # 2

I ended last with:

So, where were the pigeons?

They were always inhabitants of the deciduous forest, eating nuts and berries. It seems impossible for the pigeon to have existed in anything like the numbers it eventually attained. And a passenger pigeon without its niche and numbers is nothing more than a big, nut-eating mourning dove.

As the glaciers receded, radical changes began. Humans invaded. Whether small bands who hunted and gathered in the sea’s edge on the Pacific coast came earlier, or whether, even more controversially, some ice-edge hunters hopped over the margins of the retreating sea-ice from Europe, the general consensus is that most of the new Americans came from Asia over the Bering Land Bridge.

Recent investigations suggest that the people who became Clovis Man may have come down the ice-free corridor that opened along the flank of the Rockies on dogsleds, taking only a few months. And, whether or not you accept the so-called Pleistocene overkill scenario, most of the big native mammals, a charismatic megafauna that rivaled or surpassed that of the Serengeti, were gone in less than a thousand years. Today’s so- called megafauna – the modern bison, elk, moose, grizzlies, and wolves – are all from the Old World, just like humans.

A few of the new creatures had disproportionate impacts on the ecosystem. Bison of sorts had already existed in the west, but the new species, perhaps less constrained by competition or encouraged by a warmer climate, helped create a plains ecosystem that lasted until the buffalo hunters and the sodbusters destroyed it.

Meanwhile, east of the plains, the clever new immigrant from Asia began burning the forest. Most modern ecologists, following the lead of “fire historians” like Stephen Pyne, now believe that the environment first seen by Europeans was largely shaped by humans, using fire as a tool. The plains advanced in runners that would eventually reach to the east coast, carrying with it the open- country species like bison, elk, and prairie grouse. They all ranged as far as Massachusetts in the northeast, where the last pinnated grouse, a subspecies known as the heath hen, would perish in the1920’s.

How much the two species, human and pigeon, modified the landscape is hard to imagine. Human burning encouraged white oak, and pigeon feeding suppressed red oak, making white oak a dominant plant that sometimes made up nine-tenths of the forest. The same fires created “edge effects,” mixed belts of prairie and forest, rich in species and food for pigeons. Pigeons broke down the forest and renewed it, resurrected other plants from beneath snowdrifts of droppings, picked up seeds and spread them in a rain of creative destruction. Aerial predators feasted on the hordes; the large eastern peregrine was finished off by DDT, but its first and larger decline has been attributed to the loss of the pigeon. Even the burying beetle, a striking red and black creature, has become one of the rarest large species of insect in North America. It buries carcasses up to passenger pigeon size, and lays its eggs on them.

When A.W. Schorger wrote the last scientific book on the passenger pigeon, in 1955, no one knew much of the background material on is environment and history that is now slowly coming to light. He lamented:

“The life history of the passenger pigeon, including its extermination, contained many lacunae and contradictions…It is unfortunate and most regrettable that no competent ornithologist attempted to make a comprehensive study of the nesting and other phases of the life history of the passenger pigeon when it existed in large numbers.”

Now, with new tools, we can see not just a tragedy but a window into the complexity of life and systems in general. Australian mammalogist and ecologist Tim Flannery said that the ecology of North America has never been stable, at least since the glaciers. The passenger pigeon’s tale illuminates and is illuminated by the modern science of complexity, chaos, catastrophe theory, and self-organized criticality. It warns us that small incidents may trigger sudden catastrophes, an ominous lesson in a time of global warming. It may give us insights into how suddenly species can emerge, or even to the nature of species. After all, the passenger pigeon without its habits is biologically unremarkable. In the words of Jeffrey Lockwood, entomologist and ecologist: “Ecology is beginning to slowly shift focus with tentative explorations of what the world would look like if process, rather than matter, were the basis for reality. What if we defined a species in terms of its life processes?”

This book will be a kind of forensic ecology of the passenger pigeon, an inquiry into its life and life processes as well as its death. We already know who killed it, though we may not know exactly how. But what kind of an organism was it? What kind of a hole did its passing leave in the world? What can learning more about these questions and their answers teach us?

Even if we genetically reconstruct its genome in some future lab its world has vanished; we can’t ever bring back the “life processes” of the passenger pigeon. But we may be able to, in part, restore some of the things that have vanished, using lessons we learn from the pigeon and other extinctions. Above all, in contemplating the life of this unique bird, we realize not only what we have lost. We are reminded again of the strangeness and complexity of he universe that surrounds us, and of how much more there is to know.

There will be more!

Snakebit!

Two of our beloved tazluki relatives got snakebit by what seems, judging from the fang marks to have been a large rattler, at Daniela's. Incredibly, 15 year old Lahav got  the better of it, while grandog Shunkar seemed to have some eye involvment. Both better now-- will pass on any news.

I don't hate snakes but I hate snakes around dogs. Lahav above, Shunk below.

Why Quammen's Spillover is worth Your Time

David Quammen's new book Spillover, on emergent diseases; or more specifically, on emergent zoonoses, came out a few months ago to a series of middling good but somehow lukewarm reviews. I vehemently disagree, but it takes a bit of unfolding. Why do some readers find such a book fascinating while others find it dull?

First: I think any literate biologist will find it fascinating, a journalistic War and Peace with many adventurous protagonists, viruses as antagonists, mysterious hosts (you will learn why so many turn out to be bats, and why the source of the legendary Ebola--- which should scare you a lot less than bird flu-- probably is).

But you must understand evolution as an organizing principle of all nature to follow it. What is more, Quammen travels round the world, from northern Australia, where a disease you have likely never heard of jumps from fruit bat to horse to veterinarian, to the familiar (to his readers) rain forests of equatorial Africa, home of gorilla and chimp and bonobo, of war and bushmeat, Ebola and Marburg and AIDS. He looks at Lyme disease (not a virus by the way). He visits Bengladesh (who else bothers?) to trap flying foxes while wearing a biohazard suit, and sees a scary combination of a dense population inhabiting a semi- submerged land with poor sanitation as well as a sweet bucolic tropical nation. He goes to southern China, home of the briefly appearing SARS, which I was checked for once on a Mongolian flight from China, and where the proximity of humans, ducks, and pigs may make for the next human pandemic in the form of an unstoppable flu.

You must be patient, because  none of this has a normal narrative line. Quammen is delightfully anecdotal, but unlike in Richard Preston's entertaining and Stephen King- terrifying The Hot Zone, he is not penning a novelistic thriller that happens to be non- fiction. His aim is to have the reader understand all the origins of the diseases he writes about, that is, their evolutionary roots. He wants you to know what a virus is, and how the main kinds of virus differ, and how they evolve without being "alive". He wants you to know how and why some kind of outbreak is mathematically virtually inevitable. But nobody "explodes"; in fact, I thought that given his gentle reprimand to Preston over his using that verb re Ebola, the Saturday Wall Street Journal's giving the assignment to review the book to him was at least tactless. Preston acquitted himself as a gentleman, giving the book a mostly favorable review, but that unmentioned paragraph hung uncomfortably in the air.

Quammen ends the book by writing vividly about what a unique situation our human biosphere is, merely in its sheer mass and number of ubiquitous large mammals and their congener species. It is a subject I have only seen in science fiction. And then he closes with a description of a plague of tent caterpillars in Bozeman Montana, and what happened to them. If you read that far, and I think even non- science nerds may be captivated by then, you may finally feel your flesh creep.

The Gang of Five

Off-season Jackson Hole is a pleasure for those of us who like to have short visits. Roads are undergoing reconstruction before the major traffic hits, and many businesses are closed for renovations or revamping before the summer season. With few people, the businesses that cater to high-end travelers offer great deals during this quiet time, and Jim and I took advantage of that last weekend. Beautiful lodging, on a rainy and snowy April weekend. We drank excellent draft beers and feasted on German food at a local hangout (The Bird), and spent sunrise out on the National Elk Refuge. We saw dozens of bighorn sheep, at least 1,000 elk, numerous mule deer, pronghorn antelope, and moose - and that was just on the drive up through the Hoback from Pinedale!

While we were watching a herd of elk cross the road in front of us, we noticed a pack of five coyotes making its way across the meadow. We stayed around and watched as the pack hunted for rodents, and running together, actually managed to part the herd of elk so they could travel through. The coyotes showed no aggression toward the elk, but the elk kept tabs the movements of the coyote.

This pack of five coyotes is fairly famous as they treed two juvenile mountain lions on a buck-rail fence a few weeks ago. A NER employee happened by and got some great photos of the incident.

Here's a few images of some of the pack we encountered on Sunday. Click on the images for a larger view.

P.S. This eagle was hanging out behind the visitor center in Jackson. I love the green coloration on the fence post.

Rungius Letter!

Serendipity: not only did I pick up several interesting books at Nick Potter's in Santa Fe; in my "new" copy of the uncommon 1948 Knopf Borzoi sporting book, Russell  Annabel's Hunting and Fishing in Alaska (which I have been looking for for years) I found a letter by the greatest painter of American (or any?) big game.

This guy.

One of his greatest:

The letter:

UPDATE: Walter Hingley fills in some history. "Note the Rungius letter is to Walter Joseph Wilwerding  (1891 - 1966) who illustrated for the big three. I believe he did a lot of the Annabel articles for Sports Afield which might mean the book was Wilwerding's or maybe even Annabel's...

He has had this book for forty years:

Ian and Tom

Best concert ever-- well, I am inclined to hyperbole-- let's just say the best set of popular music I have ever seen in NM.

It could NOT have been any better, and I have seen & heard both (long) before; Ian first in 1967! Tom on stage spoke of one collaboration: "Ian wrote this when I was just four" [pause] "He was eleven at the time." All classic stuff, maybe one new song, a really spooky effort by Ian he dedicated to the hawks on his ranch "THIS IS MY SKY!"

Slight air of... valedictory?-- Ian's voice is 90% back but everything he did was haunted, perhaps because he seemed frail. "Leaving Cheyenne" made the hairs on my neck bristle. They mostly played independently with their own backups, calling each other out for collaborations.

I first heard Ian live, I repeat, in 67--!  Lib beat me with 1963, "Four Strong Winds" which Ian played last as a sing along (as was their collaboration "Navajo Rug").

Afterward it got a little goofy, perhaps because of relief that everything-- the old Lensic theater, the young guitarist whose name I  must get-- went just right. In the break & aftermath Tom was helping Nadine man the tables with art & cd's, and acting like my booster, pointing at me, yelling "Steve Bodio, The Falconer!" and giving me high fives. So I'd come back with "Tom Russell, American songwriter!", sort of a private joke, and pump my cane in the air, or (for a mutual former Magdalena friend who was there helping, "Joel Bernstein, quarter horses and violins!" Finally a woman came up and said "are you the REAL Steve Bodio? " Now: my name is uncommon enough that I may be the only one, and for sure the only one THERE, but as I looked puzzled Tom retorted "that is why I'm gonna put him in a book!"...


It turns out my "fan" was Alberta writer and rider Wendy Dudley, who took the first two photos below. The third, at Rainbow Man gallery next AM, is by Nadine on her phone, and I show the effect of broken sleep, always a travel difficulty these days. We still had too much fun.

Returning to regular operation?

Slowly anyway. Learning everything from  new Dragonspeak to IPad to keep work and communication going, still busy and rather too "Parky".  Rissy's pregnancy failed. The car broke down while we were driving Jack and Eli to the airport! You all know the public horrors, but...

Good Things are happening-- work, art, music (yes we were at the show; yes it was GREAT) and serendipity.

Even if I do sometimes feel like this:

Quote re Politics

"But wouldn't it be

Simpler if the Government

Simply dissolved the People

And elected another?"

(Bertolt Brecht --A Marxist, but one wise enough to live out of reach of the more dangerous governments)

They sure do carry on...

My relatives are OK

Federico wondered if my relatives were OK. As I have three sisters who regularly run the Marathon it was a serious question. The twins did not go up from Pittsburgh this year, and Anita St John was at mile 20 when the bombs went off at the finish line.

However, my sister Wendy, a head nurse, is apparently working on the victims, and there are or at least were armed guards on the hospital doors.

Of Lane and Jane and dog relatives

Our blog friend and frequent commenter Lane Batot lives an enviable life in the wooded hills of North Carolina, working at the zoo, rambling the wild lands with his team of dogs and his spear, reading and collecting a natural history library that would rival mine. At the moment he has thousands of books, thirteen  dogs including a pair of tazi boys from Vladimir Beregovoy that are cousins of ours, and four ferrets; if I have gotten any numbers wrong I am sure he will let me know.

But Lane is not only Ortega's "Municipal Paleolithic Man"; he is an amateur scholar of Edgar Rice Burroughs, a former Sasquatch, and a long time friend of Jane Goodall's who has worked at Gombe. They meet occasionally when Jane speaks at a nearby venue, but this year Jane and the Edgar Rice Burroughs Society conspired to fly him to LA for the big Tarzan festivities. I wish I still had the typing skills and energy to re- type his entire 20- some page handwritten letter about his wandering around in an alien habitat, but I think that his official interview will do.

A couple more photos: tazi boys, and Lane in a more natural habitat:

Riss

As some of you know, Larissa is pregnant by Tavi at Shiri's.

Accipiters

Everywhere, doing their courting flights even in town. My reading indicates Coopers at least are becoming urbanized; the Eurasian gos nests in city parks in Russia. This is the first in my thirty some years here that they have ventured so close to humans this deep into their breeding cycle. The poor pic is of a haggard male Coop in my yard last week, eating a pigeon on one of the doghouses. The good one is of a breeding age female by Carolyn Wilson; she chased a dove into the Wilson's window. Yes, they are out of town, but not that far or isolated, and the bird's habits suggest no fear...

Passenger Pigeon Diorama

After Steve's post I thought I would put up this picture of the beautiful PP diorama in the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. If I remember correctly it is set somewhere in Iowa. 

Passenger Pigeons # 1

Trying something new here. I have either three or four new possible books on deck, though how I will find energy to do them all is a... challenge. One is natural history and ornithology, one a novel, long set -aside,  and I am not sure I want to say more about either it or the other one/ two yet. But the natural history has a neat 3000 word intro/ outline/ essay and a real plan, and I thought I might put that much in here as two or three excerpts, as the whole thing is only 3000 words.

I have developed the idea a bit, though more conventionally, in Living Bird; it may be available online there, as it was published a few issues back. My actual thesis is rather more radical: the PP, at least as we "know" it, is an ecological phenomenon. Human culture (Paleoindian burning, starting as recently as 12,000 YA) created it; human culture (as in our, colonial version) killed it. Read and ponder and let me know if you want to hear more. Since "Martha" the last PP, died in 1914, it seems an appropriate date.

A Feathered Tempest:

The Improbable Life and Sudden Death of the Passenger Pigeon

“The pigeon was a biological storm. He was the lightning that played between two opposing potentials of intolerable intensity: the fat of the land and the oxygen of the air. Yearly the feathered tempest roared up, down, and across the continent, sucking up the laden fruits of forest and prairie, burning them in a traveling blast of life. Like any other chain reaction, the pigeon could survive no diminuition of his own furious intensity. When the pigeoners subtracted from his numbers, and the pioneers chopped gaps in the continuity of his fuel, his flame guttered out with hardly a sputter or even a wisp of smoke.”

-Aldo Leopold, 1947

Introduction

“Slowly the passenger pigeons increased, then suddenly their numbers

Became enormous, they would flatten ten miles of forest

When they flew down to roost, and the cloud of their rising

Eclipsed the dawn. They became too many, they are all dead.

Not one remains.”

Robinson Jeffers

The passenger pigeon was not just a bird. Calling it a “biological storm,” as Aldo Leopold did, was an understatement; it was more like a series of simultaneous biological hurricanes, blowing all the time. At its population’s peak, four to five billion pigeons roared over the forests and prairies of the east and midwest, a number equal to the entire population of overwintering birds in the U.S.. A single flock in motion could darken the sky over 180 square miles. One recorded breeding colony in Wisconsin in 1871 was 125 miles long and between six and eight miles wide. Such a flock could consume two and ten million liters of food a day.

The passenger pigeon is an icon, a symbol of the fertility of the pre-Columbian world and our ruining of Eden. We Europeans came to a world of abundance, cut down the trees, shot the pigeons, and hauled out barrels of salted pigeons in railroad cars to the markets of the east. By the 1870’s the birds were in retreat; in 1914, the last, cutely named “Martha” after George Washington’s wife, died in a zoo in Cincinnati. The pigeon’s extinction symbolizes the heedless exploitation of a continent’s riches at the hands of our culture.

All this is true, as far as it goes. But if you begin to consider the conventional narrative, to look at the tale through contemporary scientific eyes, it begins to look curiously thin.

Such a biological phenomenon could not have acted in a void. Modern ecological thinking shows us that if you subtract a species that once consisted of 40% of all the birds in North America, you lose or change more than just a bird. Passenger pigeons fed on enormous amounts of “mast,” the nuts produced by the dominant species of the eastern hardwood forest: white oak, beech, and chestnut. Of these, two are at least mildly in retreat today relative to other species, one seems to have fewer “crops,” and one is ecologically if not genetically extinct. Other species of plants also seem to be affected. Berries from no fewer than eleven families were dispersed by passenger pigeons, and some now rarely fall at any distance from their parent plant.

The pure physical effect of the flocks would have been like nothing that exists on the planet today. The weight of the pigeons and their nests damaged the forest like a hurricane, breaking limbs and even toppling trees. But no hurricane would also leave inches of nitrogen-rich droppings on the forest floor. Contemporary observers said the ground looked “snow-covered” after the pigeons passed. The droppings first killed grasses and understory vegetation, then promoted riotous growth a year or two down the line.

Other species could not help but be affected. The recently-rediscovered ivory- billed woodpecker prefers to feed in dead trees; could the loss of such abundant provisions have contributed to its near extinction? The pigeon’s demise may also have had an impact on such creatures as the Bachman’s, blue-winged, and golden-winged warbler, the Carolina parakeet, the eastern box turtle, and the American burying beetle. The term “keystone species” has become a part of our common understanding: a species so important that knocking it from its place in the ecological arch causes a tumbling cascade of change and destruction. The more one looks at the passenger pigeon, the more it looks like the “mother of all keystone species”.

I first began looking into the importance of this bird during an internet discussion among some friends, mostly naturalists and biologists, on rare and extinct birds. Someone asked a question about the pigeon. I had been reading about the Pleistocene extinctions, the coming of humans to the continent, and about the effect of fire on landscapes. Suddenly, all of these phenomena looked to be related. Some of the “facts” about the pigeon and about pre-Columbian America in general began to appear very strange. Things contrary to our simple myths began to emerge from the mist.

During the last glaciation, cold steppes existed as far south as the latitude of modern Delaware. South of this ecosystem was an extensive band of boreal forest, which also covered the Rockies, and much of the plains south of glacial-edge steppes were forested as well. Piñon-juniper savannah, better-watered than today, covered much of the southwest. Tropical ecosystems in Mexico may have been drier than today, but were in much the same place. Deciduous forest occupied only a fraction of its later space on the continent.

So, where were the pigeons?

What is this man DOING?

And how long is he likely to be doing it?

From the cover of a new issue of a venerable outdoor mag that employs several friends, a "re- creation" of a 1912 cover. Well, sorta, kinda...

But: how many times has this man been on a horse?

How long do you think the horse's ears will be pointed forward. after he shoots over them?

How long do you think his feet will be in the stirrups?

As he is not even using a hasty sling, where do you think the rifle will be?

Where do you think he will be?

Where will the horse be?

What will happen to his quarry? Where will IT be?


Myself, I would never shoot over a horse's head with anything; hold a rifle like that while shooting offhand, never mind from a horse which I wouldn't do; or hold the reins with the gun like that.*  Most likely I would get off the horse, and look for a more supported shooting position. This may be because I  have some deficiencies in horsemanship and accuracy, but also because at 63 I am aware of that fact.

If I did shoot off a horse, I would likely find out if the horse was used to it or not, use a .30-30 or other mild old lever rifle, and point it away from the horse's head. And still not hold the reins like that.

Also, look at the position of the butt on the hunter's shoulder. If it is (and it no doubt is) a .300-plus Short Magnum or other loud barrel- burner invented less than ten years ago, it is not only going to make the horse shoot straight up in the air,  it's gonna hurt his shoulder and his cheek, before it hits the ground and breaks its stock. That's OK, because he probably wouldn't have hit his elk anyway, having bought his rifle and scope on the way to the airport (as one of the clients at a hunting camp Libby used to cook for did), and then laughingly refused to sight it in (ditto).

His clothes sure are clean and pressed (though why on earth does he need camo in this situation?), but if he cheeks the stock properly, his hat brim will be in the way. Trust me on that.

O tempora! O mores!

* The 1912 cover, unfortunately about the size of a postage stamp, shows a cowboy shooting what I think is a lever action at a 3/4 angle away from the head of the horse, with dropped reins trailing on the ground.

The "Damn Chicken Song"

.. and one I first heard in I think 1967 in Cambridge. Tom Russell and Ian Tyson in Santa Fe April 17!

"All the years are... gambled and lost, like summer wages."

Quotes on Boooks and Writing

From Larry McMurtry:

"The reader might well ask why this account of the expanding and contracting of my various libraries matters at all.

"I could give several answers to the question but the simplest one is that you write what you've read, to a large degree-- and, just as importantly, you write what you will someday reread. I am now entering the time of rereading and am assembling the hundred books or so that I keep with me tore read as long as I'm here.These are the books that, over about six decades, have meant the most tome; it is because of their combined weight and tone that I have become the kind of writer  I now am."

Except for the number-- I would at a younger 63 find that impossible-- yes.  And the same incidentally for firearms... though well LESS than 100 there!

And from Malcolm Brooks:

""...to poach from J. Frank Dobie,, I guess I try to be an aristocrat in taste, but a democrat in principle... I'm glad I can be moved to tears by Dylan, or Dylan Thomas, or Thomas McGuane, or have my socks knocked off by all manner of things that somehow get into the realm of the ineffable IT. A fluted Clovis point. A Rodin.   A Harley panhead. A girl in a sundress.

"I don't think anyone can achieve perfection, but I pretty much bow to the small number of people in this gloriously messy world who strive to. Somebody asked me not long ago who my heroes were, and I said Teddy Roosevelt and Keith Richards.  From this particular vantage in history, I can't see the contradiction."

Stay tuned...

Two rather biological quotes

From William Hamilton, the eccentric genius whose new biography is on the way, and from our old neighbor David Quammen, who chronicled Bill's demise from the complications of malaria meds in his Spillover,  review on deck at last...

Hamilton, from volume 3 of his collected works:

"For me it seems that the universe only needs to be beautiful, my 'science' no more consistent or less tragic than Antigone's story or her sculpted head."

And David's rejoinder, to a scientist collecting bat samples in Uganda in hopes of finding Marburg and Ebola:

"Wait a minute, lemme get this straight: You're in a cave in Uganda, surrounded by Marburg and rabies and black forest cobras, wading through a slurry of dead bats, getting hit in the face by live ones like Tippi Hedren in The Birds, and the walls are alive with thirsty ticks, and you can hardly breathe, and you can hardly see, and...you've got time to be claustrophic?"

More from both these sources coming.

Returning with links and quotes

Busy, busy, busy, with lots of work and lots and lots of visitors-- great stuff except exhaustion makes me sleepless and "Parky". Lots of links, many quotes, news (the biggest for me: negotiating to reprint 5 backlist books including Eagle Dreams!) Sportsman's Library out and getting praise, and new book prospects getting more likely, with several possibilities...

Nor is all the news  "all about me", either. My friend Malcolm Broooks, who found me my best-ever rifle, my Mannlicher-Schonauer 1903 takedown,  has sold what may be the best first novel I have ever read, and a contender for more than that. Cat has her photo project about the world's pastoralists and the Transhumance up and running. Anne Proulx is deep in research & writing for her next.  I am on the new board of the "Amigos" of the unique Sevilleta refuge-- look for more from there soon

Geneticist and Blog commenter Federico has given me an opening, a possible way to study the "salukoid" genome, so we may at last speak with more knowledge than mere (loud) opinion.

Shiri Hoshen's  Larissa (born here) and Tavi (born in Virginia at Vladimir's) are having pups soon up near Santa Fe-- pix when she is visible.  I'll try around or on Wed the 17th when we head north to see Tom Russell play with Ian Tyson, who has miraculously regained his voice! Maybe they will do the "Damn Chicken song" for grandson Eli, who has been listening to Tom since he was in the womb. John Burchard's Tigger, born here, is also pregnant.

Tom Russell also did an almost embarassingly complimentary piece on me in Ranch and Reata-- check out that fine magazine.

Despite struggles in health, writing, and against the usual idiots, life is good...

 (My first session with the little rifle, 100 yards, iron sights and three kinds of antique ammo-- have improved!)

 Grandma Atai with Lashyn and Gallo above, and pregnant with Miss Riss below.

Tavi, Riss, John, Tig...