White Man in Africa, 1997

Dug this up when Annie D showed me a YouTube of a baby rhino-- white? -- in S Africa, in a similar predicament. Back in '97, when it was permissible if naive to think Mugabe was not a monster (such writers as Peter Godwin had already laid out the truth), when Zimbabwe had one of the most enlightened conservation programs in Africa, more innovative than ours...

Karl Hess Jr. sent us-- me and a couple of other journalists; Tom Wolf, Wendy Marston, Rich Miniter-- there at the request of the government, to report on their success, especially with elephants.

Someday maybe-- too much heartbreak soon followed. This photo taken near Kariba, where I caught the falciparum Malaria that almost killed me, and I suspect might have been the trigger that made such things as PD and RA, which I have genes for, express themselves. Certainly I never looked quite that robust again-- I look like Redmond O'Hanlon! White man in the tropics drinking gin...

The rhino's mother had been killed by poachers. The poachers had been killed by the tall, shaven- headed head ranger who, he gleefully told me, was the best ranger in Zimbabwe because "I kill more poachers!"

Birdage

Rio with his ball. He still has down. I am not used to hulking 38 ounce tiercels and their prolonged infancy- biggest male falcon I have ever flown, and slowest to mature. Though it may take him into the rains... cool, in several senses...

Survivors

Two tough animals.

Domesticity

Rio seems to be looking over Libby's shoulder as she reviews my work on the Mac.

"...all Dinosaurs had feathers"

The report (HT John Wilson) begins: "The first ever example of a plant-eating dinosaur with feathers and scales has been discovered in Russia. Previously only flesh-eating dinosaurs were known to have had feathers so this new find indicates that all dinosaurs could have been feathered."

The big thing here is the "all" I have been waiting for. Conceptually, this is huge.

The other key term is "Ornithschian", one of the two large divisions of Dinosaurs-- the plant- eating ones that often walk on four legs rather than two, including the duckbills and the Triceratops and its relatives. Some of us have thought  since the eighties that the meat- eating two legged Dinos, up to and including T rex (as Robert Bakker called it, "the 12000 pound Roadrunner from Hell"), were all feathered, and they did give rise to birds. But though we knew that some had weird bristly structures, it was less clear that the other group were feathered. Now it seems that from the start, maybe even before the Dino family split on two, that they came out of the Triassic extinctions wearing feathers. (There was a greater extinction  event BEFORE the Dinos, (see Out of Thin Air by Peter Ward), and its low- oxygen conditions may have caused the Dino- bird line to develop the air sacs, hollow bones, and efficient breathing that allow birds to fly over the Himalayas and "Brontosaurs"  to be agile moving animals even though they were bigger than my house).

In honor of all this, my favorite over- the- top depiction of the new standard, a feathered T rex attacking a "hairy" young Triceratops, and a dead Velociraptor by John Conway.

Snapshots from Rocky Mountain National Park

We hadn't been in a while and decided to do a day trip yesterday. I think we need to visit more often.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another Jarrell Quote

"Read at will."

Quote

"Art is long and critics are the insects of a day."

- Randall Jarrell

Quote

"What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error."-- Raymond Aron

Ornithology

Bear with me for a little more photoblogging, as I am getting some work done. Here are two NM nests that fledged young this year, a Goshawk and a Peregrine, courtesy of Paul Domski.

Just for fun

From Jim at Frontier Partisan. What on earth do you think the Villistas were doing with that punt gun?

Leucistic magpies

Snapped near Bozeman MT by Larry Day. He says there is a family.

More Doggage

Jutta's irresistible Nhubia and Taalai from Germany, once again...

"Use it or lose it"-- would you believe Nhubia (white) is almost twelve?

Shannon Hiatt, 1950- 2014

When Dr Jon Esposito-- vet, pigeon expert, above all old  friend, called this evening from El Paso, I had an odd apprehension, all too well  confirmed in his first sentence: "Shannon just died-- they found him  in his pigeon loft, yesterday".

One the one hand, it was an appropriate way to go, almost comedically perfect for the co- author of the single best text on pigeons in our day, with Jon.

On the other, one of the finest and kindest scholars and biophiles of my acquaintance was gone, and I felt a stab of remorse. Busy lives only 5 hours away had kept us in far too little touch (he had an aversion to email), and I somehow thought, as we do, that sooner or later we would catch up. Now we can't.
 
Shannon was one of the dedicatees of Aloft, and in an eerie coincidence or synchronicity, the new edition came out the day he died.  I was so pleased I thought I would email him. Jon's call came first.

Shannon had traveled many miles both geographically and intellectually, from youthful fundamentalist preacher to evolutionary biologist (while never scorning his roots) to writing teacher at UTEP, English prof, and writer. The best modern pigeon book by so far a margin you can't see the others in the dust behind, his and Jon's The Pigeon Guide (look it up, too tired for code), is the one book you will need to understand this amazing bird and its attractions. Just as in mine, the constant in his life through all its many places and faces was the underrated and much despised domestic Pigeon. I defy any "biophile" to read their book and come way un- tempted by the bird.

More as I know more...

A little poetry

An excerpt, a vision of Elysian fields by Tim Murphy. He has a HUGE collection coming out next year-- watch for it.

Forests and fields lie just north of the Gulf,

teeming with boar and hunted by the wolf.

We rack our spears at sunset.  Songs are sung,

and all the hunters and their dogs are young.

Weekend Doggage

For once not a salukoid, but Tina Garfield's Anatolian puppy, who is not quite at full growth yet, at the PO.

Photoblogging...

Heavy medical week, to and from Albuquerque 100 miles away 4 times, so don't expect much but photos. This one is from Carlos up in Laramie, riding Juan past Elk Mountain with Lola on point. Amazing to me it was taken on a phone...

Real West

Novelist- rancher- horseman John L. Moore in his Querencia,  many miles east of the chic part of Montana. If I were ever driven out of here, that is the first place I would go.

These photos were taken by a New York filmmaker, Kelly Colbert, who is doing a documentary on a horse, working title “His Name is Midnight”; she seems unusually open to ways she hadn't known. John says "She is tracing the roots of an abused older gelding she rescued on the east coast and trying to find the source of his unusual will to live and sense of presence. What she found is the relatively unknown Oswald blood. She is also learning what a true ranch horse is."

And,  read his Looking for Lynne. I don't just believe in it; I blurbed it.

Links

What we have been looking at online...

First and most importantly: if you care about the Animal "Rights" issue, and how its proponents plan to do away with all the ways we work and play with animals, you best pay attention to the impending ban of the Central Park horses. No one has done a better job covering it than Jon Katz at Bedlam Farm Journal , even through his open heart surgery last week.

This may be the single most appalling and dictatorial example of what these ignorant, fascistic (yeah, I know mayor Di Blasio is a  Marxist-- and what did New Yorkers think they would get when they elected a mayor who honeymooned in Cuba?) hysterical know- nothings are hoping to do everywhere. From Jon's latest post:

"If the mayor heard or saw any of those comments – 66 per cent of New Yorkers oppose the ban, along with the Central Park Conservancy, The Chamber of Commerce, The Teamsters Union, the New York Post, New York Daily News, and New York Times  – he has never acknowledged it, discussed it, reflected upon it."

" The mayor speaks of the issue only in short and inarticulate blurbs like those at this week's press conference. He refuses to speak with the carriage owners, visit the drivers or the stables, or even recognize the people in the carriage trade as human beings who deserve consultation about the loss of their livelihood,  their fate and future. The dehumanization of the carriage trade people is one of the ugliest and most disturbing elements in the campaign against the horses, especially from a mayor who labels himself a progressive.

"It seems the mayor is also determined to push ahead with a plan to replace the horses with vintage electric cars, which will cost about $160,000 apiece. If New Yorkers are united behind the idea of keeping the horses, they are even more horrified at the thought of flooding Central Park with more cars. Only the mayor seems to think cars are more eco-friendly than horses.

"There are also plans, according to the media, to take the horses away from the carriage owners and require that they only be sold to farms and preserves where it is guaranteed that they will never work...."

"It is known that the mayor's teenage daughter first awakened him to the carriage horse issue after viewing animal rights websites online, and that the mayor has never lived with an animal, not even a dog or a cat...."

"They have broken no law, violated no regulation, committed no crimes. If their work and way of life are to be taken from them, they are entitled to talk about it with their elected officials."

Read also here. You know the true cliche: "first they came for the carriage horses..."

Now, some cheerful stuff-- I do not want to wreck your weekend...

Also from New York: great piece on chef & writer Tony Bourdain, one that recognizes what I always thought was the deep truth behind the gonzo humor: "American writers rarely write about work anymore. Not tech work, quant work, digital work, but real work, manual work, crew work, often skilled but sweaty. Bourdain’s depiction of the kitchen crews he worked on, their mad camaraderie and the kind of inspired improvisational feats of high-heat athleticism they performed are tours de force."

Libby with a younger Bourdain

The beauty of book endpapers. Someday I should scan just the endpapers of my William Beebe collection.

Flight  might have evolved many times amidst the small feathered dinos. Dinosaurs are birds!

Did Tibetans get their high altitude genes from Denisovans? Our lineage becomes ever more complex...

The Passenger pigeon's extinction might have been more complex than "mere" extermination. I have been getting some grief for saying so in Living Bird. History will absolve me!

New sculpture coming...

Just a teaser from Sarah Madigan...

Quote

You know the essence of this, from Chandler, but Micah Mattix adds something from a Prufrock last week:

"There is no such thing as high or low culture. There is interesting culture and boring culture. There are works of art that show great skill and those that don’t."

The Bird Today

With Taik. Think these two will work together?

Magdalena Old Timers Fiesta

Good week with the hawk and with guest Annie Hocker; bad week with my right hip, and not very productive. But once a year, local patriotism demands I pay some attention to Magdalena's only event that brings out of towners in. Yeah, it's hokey and country and so what? We missed it when water worries  cancelled it last year, and I always see unexpected people, especially but not always from the ranches.  As always right or double click to enlarge.

A cowboy bunch-- Wade Dixon, Vida Trujillo (widow of Viejo, who you can search up), Shonda and Darryl Welty. The Welty ranch is 60 plus dirt road miles away, and Wade works in Catron county, so we don't see them every day.

... in our bar

We have a parade- candidates...

Anniversaries...

...  unclassifiable New Mexican oddities...

Dead animals (yes, that oryx has one horn pointing up and one down)

The mayor (in the back, playing)

Wonderful old cars (I long for when they drove wild cows through town ahead of the cars, but I am beginning to sound like I was born in 18 not 1950)

Our  reporter (and beer maker) John Larson, and him shooting the float with Paul Pino's band, who in one incarnation or other have provided a soundtrack for my last, what, 34 years? Paul's stepson Rudy was one of the dedicatees of my pigeon book Aloft.

Dogs enjoy OT in their own way

I'm backing my friend Ed for sheriff. There is a persistent rumor that a popular TV series mined a period in his life for its first season. I'll never tell...

Two women I love: Sylvia Troy and Hilda Kelly, Tom's wife. Hilda: "Take those three and call it three Magdalena hookers!" Me: "No Hilda, not unless you get in too." She did, immediately. Unfortunately that one didn't come out. She has been married to Tom, below, with Jeannie and Tita, who makes an appearance in Hibben's Hunting American Lions as a "young cowboy",  for longer than I have been alive or than there has been a paved road to Magdalena. He is 86. I won't presume to ask a lady her age.

Sunday Random Doggage

Micaela's J litter in Finland with dachshund. I'd take that black and white pup.

Pre- flight

Pre- flight training at Lee Henderson's La Jencia Ranch. In the last three I am alternating an oversized Kazakh hood he has been training with and a proper Gyr hood-- the rest are self explanatory. Double or right click for BIG images.

Lib reminds me to say that the ranch has good grass over most of it, not trampled sand and cow poop- we are starting his training right in by the inner corrals around the house,  because we want him to home in there if he wanders. Last photo, added later, would be on high ground just to the right of the first photo with the sign, at the edge of the rising ground, looking from that high ground back over the whole ranch, virtually through the headquarters where these were taken.