What wine goes with..?

A reliable guide:

It is official

You might have figured it out in comments below but it is official: because the Feds are allowing a three- decade exemption for wind farms to kill as many eagles as they "need" to, and because they exert no pressure on tribal use (right and understandable for religious practice, but ignoring the profitable if clandestine traffic in feathers for dance costumes), falconers will no longer be allowed to catch "up to six" eagles for falconry in areas of proven depredation, exactly reversing the win- win scenario Cat details below.

Nobody ever took six a year, an infinitesimal part of the breeding surplus; ranchers had proven predators removed; falconers got the companionship of one of the world's formidable predators, often for decades, and the chance to participate in one of if not THE oldest falconry tradition on earth, at least six thousand years old.

Presumably if we do not fight this it means "for three decades?" Or forever?

And why in hell not allow trapping in wind farms?

No more of this!

My computer has just had a mental breakdown!

Apologies. Actually the blog and webs seem fine. The mail and some other things are off. I get but cannot receive mail (I get large attachments so that is not the trouble). Regular correspondents are being dumped in the spam file. And oddest of all, I can download photos from my camera, but cannot edit or open or export them-- although I can see thumbnails the program insists they do not exist. I cannot export them, and while I was trying to, over 300 photos from my "art" folder suddenly dumped into IPhoto in a few seconds, and I only stopped it dumping thousands I have stored by pulling the plug! Yikes.

So apologies to the regular circle, to John M and Dr John B, and especially to Pete Humphreys, who is sending me great material on "Roaring Emma". I'll be back-- actually I may just be able to get through on Libby's new IPad, which I have been tardy in learning as I have been working overtime...

Red Kite?

I can't prove the bird morphed into an "eagle" in the hoax video below was a red kite (Milvus milvus) but I have seen a few in the wild and I think it was. A beautiful bird with remarkable buoyancy and power of flight, a common medieval street scavenger, a most challenging quarry hunted through the high clouds by Gyrs and Sakers (the Craigheads did some of the last of this in pre- Partition India in 1940 and documented it in film and writing), the bird became rare with modern sanitation and persecution, was reintroduced, and is now common again. I saw my first one from a train just north of Marseilles but they are everywhere now.

The other reason confirming my uneasiness with eagle ID (other than long the long narrow crooked wings with light patches and its quite forked but nevertheless kitelike tail (young are not forked)- is that the Francophone hoaxers said it was a "Royal Eagle". Ain't no such bird, but the filmmakers might have known that the kite in the film is known as the "Milan Royal".
Film:

Kite images from the Net:

Another dumb quote

From a review in the New Yorker for 27 August: "Buying a car, Grescoe writes "is the beginning of a spiral through selfishness, road rage, and anomie, one whose ultimate goal is the mall or the gated community".

Unless you, you know, live in the country.

Do our coastal elites even "get" Upstate New York? (Yes, I know Grescoe is Canadian).

What they might think of a town of less than a thousand, forty miles on one side and 26 on the other from the nearest small towns, and 100 from a city, is hard to imagine.