Jack at work

My stepson Andrew Jackson Frishman of Crest, Cliff and Canyon, at work as well as play on the lip of the Grand-- photo by Greg Russell.

Make sure you read their posts on a place under threat of a kind of development that would be ridiculous were it not real. Not all "Natives" are benign nature worshippers...

Oldest Falconry Film?

I have the Craighead film of their months with an Indian prince just before WWII, which is not unlike having films of Emperor Frederic in Medieval Sicily, or of being able to step into the print of Vadim Gorbatov's "Kublai Khan's Hawking Party" hanging to my right. But this short film, made before the first World War in Algeria in 1909, and sent by several readers, may be the oldest hawking ever filmed if not the most elevated (a friend cracked "just like you guys-- throwing (implying "wasting") peregrines at bunnies". Brief saluki glimpses too...

A Few Birds

Coming back this weekend after work, sick days, and generally too much, and that dull. (Why is it so hard to pay writers dammit???) We will have links, pix, dog news, poetry. I will finally review David Quammen. I will announce others. There will be.... MORE. Tonight though, good photos... as always, right or double click and embiggen.

This extremely early bandtail showed up at Carolyn and John Wilson's in the Magdalenas two days past. Photo by Carolyn W:


Goshawks. This adept pigeon- killing young male was in Larry Day's backyard outside of Bozeman MT. I wonder if his meal descended from Spanish pouters I gave Larry 20 years past...


A relative but Melierax not Accipiter-- dark chanting goshawk photographed by Texas writer Dennis Sumrak while hunting in Namibia. Dennis is working on a piece on our water crisis and has been seen at the Spur...


Can anyone remember a Roy Campbell poem-- "Singing Hawk" perhaps-- about this bird? I seem to but can't find it...

HMS Surprise

After posting a quote from one of Patrick O"Brian's novels earlier this week, I remembered that I had some more Aubrey-Maturin related material to share.

About 15 months ago I posted some nighttime pictures I had taken on the San Diego waterfront including this one of a sailing ship whose name I did not know. As Mr. Peculiar pointed out in the comments, this was the HMS Surprise, replica ship used in the filming of the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, based on O'Brian's novels.

Last September I was in San Diego doing some field work, and was able to take an afternoon off to tour the Maritime Museum of San Diego, a wonderful museum I recommend to you all, and where the HMS Surprise is moored.

The ship began its life as the Rose, built in Canada in 1970. Its design was based on British Admiralty plans used to build the frigate HMS Rose, which was launched in 1757.

Until 2001, the Rose was based on the east coast and used as a training ship for tall ship sailors. That year, it was bought by Twentieh Century Fox studios, who officially changed the name and modified it for use in filming the movie.

After the movie was completed and released in 2003 the Maritime Museum obtained the ship. It sails around San Diego harbor several times a year and you can pay to sail on board and pretend you are Russell Crowe.

If you have seen the movie before touring the ship, you can tell that it must have been used almost exclusively for exterior shots and that scenes set on board ship were shot on a sound stage. It was still fun to see. I also understand it was used to shoot scenes for one of the Johnny Depp Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

Happy Birthday Bella

It seems hard for us to believe, but our granddaughter Isabella Wilson had her third birthday a few days back. Connie and I were able to make a quick trip to California to participate in the festivities.

As you can see in this picture, Bella is in a princess phase right now and firmly believes that a tiara (she calls it her “tirana-crown”) should be part of her daily attire. Princess-like appearance is one thing, but princess-like behavior depends on which princesses you choose for role models. One of Bella’s favorite princesses is Princess Leia. While we were visiting, I watched one of her episodes of play where, while wearing her blue princess dress and tiara, she shot imaginary Imperial Stormtroopers with an imaginary blaster rifle while calling for an imaginary Han Solo (who happened to be me) to give her covering fire.

A warrior princess it is.

Historic Preservation Board

I am proud to announce that the Douglas County Commissioners have appointed me to a three year term on the County Historic Preservation Board. It’s a volunteer position and the Board is an advisory body that gives advice and makes recommendations to the county’s decision-making groups.

Here’s the Board's mission statement:

The Board conducts research on historic resources in the County; advises property owners on methods for preserving sites and artifacts; makes recommendations to the Planning Commission and the Board of County Commissioners regarding zoning and subdivision issues related to historic resources; facilitates the collection, cataloging, preservation and interpretation of donated historic artifacts; and works to educate County residents on historic matters.

It sounded like fun to me, so I applied last fall. You can find out more about the Board and Douglas County history and prehistory here at the County website.

Species Shift

I have noted a change in some of the visitors to our feeders this winter: one of our most common year-round birds, House Finches, have almost completely disappeared. Another common winter visitor, White-crowned Sparrows, have also gone missing. Their places appear to have been taken by large numbers of American Tree Sparrows, who rarely showed up in previous years.
 

Most of our other usual winter birds are here however, like this Junco, waiting with one of the American Tree Sparrows for a turn at the feeder during last Sunday's snow storm.

Here's a dual portrait of our missing friends taken in March 2009.

Dr. Stephen Maturin on Falcons and Wives

During the hymns and psalms, which a certain rivalry between Surprises and Dromedaries rendered more vehement than musical, his attention wandered, returning to his anonymous letter and his thoughts of Diana – of her particular sort of faithfulness – of her extremely spirited resentment of any slight – and it occurred to him that she was not unlike a falcon he had known when he was a boy in his godfather’s house in Spain, a haggard, a wild-caught peregrine of extraordinary dash and courage, death to herons, ducks and even geese, very gentle with those she liked but wholly irreconcilable and indeed dangerous if she was offended. Once the young Stephen had fed a goshawk before the falcon, and she had never come to him again, only staring implacably with that great fierce dark eye. ‘I shall never offend Diana, however,’ he observed.


Treason’s Harbour, Patrick O’Brian

Primitive dogs

 Jim and I have been invited to speak at an international conference on the use of aboriginal/primitive dogs that will take place this summer in South Africa. We'll be giving one presentation to the general session (on the use of Aziats/Central Asian Ovcharkas to guard domestic sheep in the Rocky Mountains) and two poster presentations (one on the benefits and challenges to the use of livestock protection dogs, and the other on the use of LPDs in association with large carnivore populations). While we look forward to sharing our experiences, we're excited at the prospect of being with other people who live in close association with working dogs around the world. Our friend Guverner from Turkey is expected to attend, as well as our friends Atila and Sider from Bulgaria. Having this group in one room is reason enough for us to make the effort to attend. We're told that an expert on C.A. Ovcharkas from Tajikistan plans to attend also.

The dogs in the image above are Turkish lions - native Kangal dogs working to protect a sheep herd that are just out of the frame. These are adolescent pups. (As always, click on an image for a larger view.)

The next two images are of guardian dogs in Mongolia - typical of the dogs we saw in our travels there.

The next three images are Spanish mastiffs, ,working to protect sheep, goat and cattle herds.

 This is a Transmontano Mastiff in Portugal.

 And last but not least, the Bulgarian Karakachan.

The upcoming Africa trip was unexpected, and we are using the opportunity to travel there to acquire the remaining images needed for a black-and-white photography exhibit I've been working on for seven years. United States Artists is backing the exhibit project, called Portraits Of Pastoralism, and this crowd-source funding program is doing a funding challenge for us through March 20. If you are interested, have a look at the project page, and be sure to watch the video where you'll see some of the images in the exhibit, as well as a sheep busily picking my pockets as I try to talk seriously about the project.

Hot Links

Look at this collection of gorgeous pictures of a spiny trilobite. I'd never seen one of these before.

According to this study, our preagricultural ancestors had healthier mouths and teeth than we do. Is this a surprise?

It is apparent to me that every few months, there is another press release citing a new radiocarbon date or some DNA evidence addressing the final time line for the demise of Neanderthal populations in Europe: they went extinct earlier than we thought, later than we thought, there was (or wasn't) a Neanderthal refuge in southern Spain, etc. I shouldn't be cranky about this, as it's obvious that the purpose of a press release is to emphasize how important, special, unique or definitive a particular finding is. But in the case of large, complex regional questions like this, in the future there are always going to be more radiocarbon dates or new DNA techniques adding pieces to the puzzle and all we can say is that as of right now, this is what the data tell us.

In what appears to be more definitive chronometric news, new radiocarbon dates have shown that the famous Paleolithic statuette of the Lion Man of Ulm , originally excavated in Germany in 1939, dates to 40,000 years ago.  This is older than previously thought and makes it the oldest known figurative sculpture.

A new DNA study just released finds that a number of physical traits common in Asian populations, such as thick hair, dense sweat glands, and some skin features, arose from a single mutation that occurred 30,000 years ago.

Linguists, psychologists and computer scientists at UC Berkeley and the Univeristy of British Columbia have developed a statistical-based computer model that they believe will help them reconstruct ancestral "proto-languages" from known historic languages. I always have a tendency to wonder about these and how you can judge their accuracy.

Canadian and Spanish marine archaeologists are co-operating on the reconstruction of Canada's oldest shipwreck. The San Juan, a Basque galleon used for whaling, sank off the Labrador coast in the 1560s. I keep expecting that archaeologists in the Maritimes will find 15th century European sites or shipwrecks. There is much circumstantial, but not definitive, evidence, well-covered in Brian Fagan's book Fish on Friday, that Basque, Gascon, and Portugese fisherman and whalers exploited the fisheries of the Grand Banks in the late 1300s and 1400s. Those that knew about it did their best to keep it a secret to exclude competition. Fagan speculates that Columbus may have known quite a bit about this prior to his 1492 voyage.

Excellent Quote

From Michael Gruber's blog:

"Nothing pleases Apollo better than the slaughtering of a frivolous irresponsible reviewer on his altar."

- Georg Christof Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

A Literary Conversation

Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner suffered from a situation that affects many authors: his novels and stories got good reviews but he was not rewarded with good sales. Throughout most of his career, he was plagued by financial insecurity.

To be completely fair, this insecurity didn’t keep Faulkner from owning an ante-bellum mansion, his own airplane, owning numbers of show-jumping horses, or ordering top-of-the-line suits on account from Phil A. Halle in Memphis. But I guess we all have our own baseline.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Faulkner was able to make enough money to keep body and soul together by taking screenwriting jobs in Hollywood. Faulkner hated the work, hated the long separations from his family, and hated being away from his native Mississippi that was the source of inspiration for his work. While in California however, he would often go hunting or on field trips to the countryside to break the tedium of being trapped in Los Angeles.

In 1932, on one of his screenwriting stints, he was working on scripts with the famed director Howard Hawks. One weekend he went on a brief trip with Hawks and one of Hawks’ friends who had a .410 over-and-under shotgun that Faulkner admired so much he wanted one like it. The friend was movie idol Clark Gable.

In Hawks’ car they drove one fall night into the Imperial Valley for some dove-hunting the next day. Hawks began to talk about books. Instead of freezing, as he usually did when people began to talk literature, Faulkner entered into the conversation. Though intelligent, Gable was not literary, and he remained silent. Finally, he ventured a question.

“Mr. Faulkner,” he said, “what do you think somebody should read if he wants to read the best modern books? Who would you say are the best living writers?”

After a moment Faulkner answered. “Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner.”

Gable took a moment to absorb that information. “Oh,” he said, recovering, “do you write?”

“Yes, Mr. Gable," Faulkner replied. “What do you do?”


From Faulkner: A Biography, William Blotner

Napoleon Chagnon is Still Standing

I was surprised by this fairly objective article in the NY Times on the remarkable life and controversial career of cultural anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. This story is an example in microcosm of the descent of cultural anthropology over the last thirty years into mindless political correctness.

Chagnon was famous for his 1960s field work with the Yanomamo, and his book on them was required reading in a number of classes I took both as an undergraduate and in graduate school. Over the years his description of the Yanomamo as an inherently violent people fell out of favor as flawed and too judgmental, but his biggest sin in the eyes of many cultural anthropologists was his opinion that some aspects of human behavior are based on genetic information passed from parents to children. To many anthropologists, that smacked of the Eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th century that used Darwinian ideas to justify racist efforts to “improve” the gene pool. Lamentably, his critics quickly defaulted to calling him a racist and a Nazi in the late 1970s, and the battle has been on ever since.

The attacks culminated in a non-scholarly book published in 2000 that accused him of fabricating field work results and of intentionally conspiring to cause a measles epidemic among the Yanomamo. An objective view of these charges would indicate most of them are specious. Chagnon hasn’t helped himself by alienating some people with his large ego and prickly personality, but the attacks on him have gone far beyond anything reasonable. Advanced genetic research over the last 10-15 years shows he wasn’t far off on some of his opinions. Chagnon feels vindicated by his election to the National Academy of Sciences last year.

Key quotes:

From Chagnon - “The last bastions of resistance to evolutionary theory are organized religion and cultural anthropology.” Speaks for itself.

From one of Chagnon’s critics, Leslie Sponsel - “The charges have not all been disproven by any means.” Love the attitude – guilty until proven innocent.

Read The Whole Thing.

Exciting Bird!

Today John Wilson and I took off at dawn and drove up past 10,000 feet on South Baldy in the Magdalena Range, surveying a rather unlikely habitat for the annual "Backyard" Bird Count. I doubted that we would see much more than ravens and a few boreal forest- type hardy songbirds of the general type such places share with Montana, Maine, and even Siberia. But I figured most birders would be down below on the Rio Grande Bosque, 4000 or so feet below, and we would have the privilege of making our own discoveries.

For the most part I was right-- the most exciting bird we saw (because entirely local, with no representatives in John's native Ohio) was the not very rare Townsend's solitaire. But just after we turned around at the observatory gate near the highest ridge, I saw a little orange blob on a twig's tip just ahead. I am a bit shortsighted and I wasn't wearing my glasses, and we had just been talking about the wishful pseudo- birds your eyes make out of inanimate objects, but I trained my binocs on it and said "stop, it's a real bird." As he brought up his glasses I thought "WTF, ORANGE?" Not in my winter search programs. By insane Jungian synchronicity we had been talking with Libby over our pre- dawn coffee about a flock of white winged crossbills that had hung around our backyard feeder ten years ago, and as I started to say in awed puzzlement "Crossbill...??" John said firmly, as though reading my mind, "RED". Meaning the other species or, esoterically (look it up) species flock. There were about thirty, feeding and basking and in no hurry at all.

I hadn't seen any red crossbills in over ten years, and never in NM, so it was a "State Life" bird. I took a lousy photo with my pointandshoot, and John took some good ones with his "real" camera, the first to be attached now and the others to come soon. When he regretted the bar being closed to raise a glass to the little wanderers, I remembered that my pack contained a silver half- pint antique flask of vodka. We took our shots and toasted: "Confusion to our enemies!" (me); and "God bless the Czar, and keep him far away from us!" (John). Photos below and to come...



UPDATE: Here is my favorite of John's-- I like the lichen and rock as well as the bird-- and a flock pic. What on earth are they eating?

Preview and Tease

Reviews on deck of many books-- Dan Baum on guns (see Saturday the 16th's's WSJ review section), David Quammen on scary viruses; and most fun of all, Katrina van Grouw's The Unfeathered Bird...

Curmudgeonly Quotes and Related Matters

A :Dave Petzal, Field & Stream's resident curmudgeon (and the main if not only reason to read that mag any more) was asked why he had such a bad attitude. He responded:

"Because I have had the opportunity to observe human beings for seven decades, and if you do it for that long and don't have a foul disposition, either you're simple or you haven't been paying attention."


Exhibit B, from The Selected Letters of William Styron, quoting his friend Irwin Wallace: "...no magazine is happy unless they remove the gonads from a writer's work."


C is merely melancholy, on the recent suicide of a hacker, from the pseudonymous "Mencius Moldbug": "No one ever had a chance to tell him that his only honorable option was to live in the past."


D is a headline in one of our main contemporary sporting mags, on hunting rare animals in a fenced preserve and using the money for conservation; I have some esthetic reservations and traditional ones, but my most severe might be... grammatical.* Can NO one see obvious mistakes anymore? The title reads: EXOTIC AND EXTICT.


E, the last for now, courtesy of John Wilson but quoting Ohio naturalist Tom Schied, says more about the originator's wit than the quality of the recipients. Or, well, maybe not-- it is one of those things you wish you had said. Describing to John Wilson (below) the non- joy of casting pearls of wisdom in front of the invincibly ignorant, he spoke of a pair to whom he had shown what Andrey Kovalenko calls a "World Class Bird", only to find them bored and impatient to turn on the radio and move on: John, it was like... it was like showing your stamp collection to an iguana."

*Fairly recently a young editor asked me the source of the phrase "The way of an eagle in the air". I gave the answer as King James Version, such and such book, chapter, verse etc. The person-- I do not know whether male or female but I am sure young, responded as though I were an idiot with "NO-- what BOOK? WHO WROTE IT?"

UPDATE: Libby just read this. As regular readers know, she works for the Post Office, a source of tales of humor and horror second only to the Zoo. She instantly cited a customer, a teacher no less, who when she got to the head of the line asked "How much is a two- cent stamp?"

Dawn at Harbin, 1928

A ragged dawn, yellowish gray, was loping in from Siberia, like a frightened pariah dog, when we finally left the Fantasie. The town recoiled from the lightening streets, huddled miserably in the bitter cold, under a ragged smoke scroll, crouching almost at the top of the lived-in world. A forgotten town, miserable in its licensed existence, no longer defiant over its transgressions.

Somewhere in the distance there was a clack of hoofs – stunted Siberian ponies pulling a tiny droshky. But it was going away from us. And there were no taxis.

Irregular Gentleman, James Warner Bellah

Valentine Dogs

From Shiri: Riss and Tavi.

And-- on a "new" computer, how do I center photos?

Goshawks in Love

Courtesy of Pecular. Happy Valentine's Day! Here's a link to a bigger version of the photograph, and here is one to the photographer, photoblogger Juanma Hernandez: Gos photos and more, including the first action scenes I have ever seen of a wryneck...

Ice Age Art

I enjoyed this review in the Financial Times of an exhibit at the British Museum and thought you might, too. I really liked this picture of a 20,000 year-old mamoth ivory carving of a wisent, or European bison (Bison bonasus).

As I have mentioned here many times, it's amazing that the very earliest Paleolithic cave art we know of is quite realistic and well-executed and sometimes it appears as though we skipped over the "stick figure" phase of drawing development. It's also interesting that the animals in cave paintings are generally portrayed much more realistically than are any humans that appear.

Eagle study

I am working on a portfolio for review at an upcoming art conference, and selected an eagle study as the theme. Here are a few of those images. (Click on an image to enlarge.) Enjoy!

Minor announcement, and one more interesting...

I was bemused to see I was just declared to be in the top ten percent of people searched for at LinkedIn. This is only remarkable because (1) there are twenty MILLION people in that network; (2) I have never done much with it-- I mean, I TWEET more; and (3) as my father used to say "if you're so famous how come you ain't rich?"

Here is their message you are supposed to put in FaceBook and such; I have to put it here, with unclothed code:

"Hurray! I have one of the top 10% most viewed @LinkedIn profiles for 2012. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/profile/17/a39/a3a"

More of interest I suspect: Ataika's daughter Riss (LaRISSa), up by Santa Fe with Shiri Hoshen, is in heat and Shiri hopes to breed her to Tavi. That 3/4 Almaty 1/4 St Petersbug cross (Lash born here, Tavi at Vladimir Beregovoy's in Virginia), is about my favorite possible in the US-- we chose pick of this litter as possibly our last tazi ; remember we are 63 and 66 and that Taika's mother and grandmother hit 20, and Taika isn't even mellow at 9! Will talk to any serious people. Remember they are primitives and you cannot browbeat them; they are smarter than most humans...

Got Geese?

We are absolutely overrun with Canada geese this winter. I can't remember a year since we moved here in 2007 that we've had this many. Lately we have been in their flight-path as they spend the day feeding in grain fields and pastures to the east of us and then return to reservoirs and creeks in the Cherry Creek valley to the west of us. Thousands of them fly westward cackling over the house around dusk. Please click to "embiggen" the picture above I took from our deck at sunset a few days ago.

Dog Talk

Our dogs talk a lot. That comes with the territory when you live with Australian shepherds, and every one we have had has talked to one degree or another. It’s always been something I enjoy about them.


Sadie, our seven year-old female, has used a single, multi-purpose vocalization since she was a very young dog. She looks you in the eye to get your attention and then makes a low growling-like noise. Often she will walk backwards while doing this for emphasis.

This generally means that she wants to go outside, but it can also mean that the water bowl needs to be refilled, or that she thinks it is time for dinner. She will often start telling me it is time to eat a half hour or so before scheduled dinner time. Sometimes when I tell her firmly it’s not time yet, she will sit down, give me a hurt look, and issue a long, tortured sigh.

Since we got the pups last spring, Sadie has used her communication skills to cover managing them as well. Buck and Cash will go outside with her when she asks to go out, but on other occasions, she tells me to let the pups go out, but she wants to stay inside. Lately, she’s also been telling me when she thinks it’s time to let them back in.

Buck and Cash have learned this from her. They both use a sort of yodeling sound rather than a growl, but it can go up in scale to a yip if they don’t think I’m paying enough attention. Cash rarely does it, and seems to have delegated the job to Buck, who does it all the time. I find that most of the time when Buck comes to me and asks to go out, Cash is already standing by the door. It can get pretty noisy around here when Buck and Sadie decide to gang up on me just before dinner time.

Of course we talk to our dogs a lot, too. Generally, I’ve always thought that what they hear is much like the classic Gary Larson cartoon I put in at the top. But sometimes, I don’t know.

I have to frame this by telling you that we have one of those “invisible fence” systems. It’s an off the shelf one we bought at a pet store years ago. Generally it works very well, and the dogs have about two and a half acres where they can roam without supervision and we don’t have to worry about them wandering off. We don’t leave them out in it when we are not at home, as it doesn’t keep bad actors (coyotes, other dogs, bad people, etc.) out, it just keeps our dogs in.

Well a few days ago, Buck’s collar malfunctioned, so I had to keep an eye on him as he likes to roam and explore. We got it fixed quickly enough. The dogs and I were watching TV in the family room and Sadie gave me her “want to go outside” signal. I said to her, “Okay, you and Cash can go out, but Buck has to stay inside because his collar is broken.” I stood up, and Sadie and Cash ran to the door to go out, but Buck didn’t move a muscle. After the two dogs went out, Buck looked at me and sighed as if to say he had wanted to go out, too.

Quiet days

We aren't having much of a winter here in western Wyoming, with not nearly as much snow as we've come to expect. While I'm keeping my fingers crossed for major snow storms to hit later on, or a rainy spring, the wildlife sure seem to be benefiting from the mild conditions. These pronghorn antelope appear to be in excellent condition.

But at this time of year, we expect critters to look more like this (Roo the burro):

I've had a busy and somewhat unusual start to 2013. My book, The Guardian Team: On the Job With Rena and Roo, was named Book of the Year by the American Farm Bureau Federation. They flew me to Nashville to receive the award, and sign hundreds of books.

I also got to hang out with Jack Hanna.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Hud the herding dog guards Jim's lunch box. He has nothing else to do this time of year.