Himalaya and Tragopans

Dr Hypercube recently mentioned the excellent book Tales of the Himalaya: Adventures of a Naturalist by the late Lawrence Swan of Darjeeling and California. I would have loved to know Swan, who climbed and collected all over the mountains and valleys I long to see, and may have been the last in a long line of Europeans (so to speak) who did so. I envy them!

All things Himalayan are touched on with wit and knowledge-- the geese that fly over Everest, the abominable snowman (he is skeptical but someone I know-- Libby actually-- has seen odd tracks); the frogs that illustrate the collision of continents; the aeolian zone; the abundant hordes of relentless leeches (Libby confirms with a shudder, forty years later); the quirks of Sherpas and climbers. Recommended highly by both Diary of a Mad Natural Historian and Q, backed by L who has had the boots- on- the- ground experience (I'll find a photo).

I don't know whether it is sad that Tales is a Print- On- Demand title or that POD is exactly where good quirky books are going-- if so, all the more reason to buy.

The book also features a delightful chapter on Himalayan pheasants, especially the surreally beautiful Tragopans. These birds are my favorite creatures other than raptors and tazis, and in my opinion the most beautiful birds in the world, beating out such showy contenders as birds of paradise. Swan kept them, and was lucky enough to see their courtship, where they extrude a weird "bib" of blue and red, and grow horns. What perfect dinosaurs!


These paintings are from William Beebe's Pheasants, Their Lives and Homes, which chronicle his pursuit of pheasants in the early decades of the twentieth century in places like the Himalayas and Burma and, with the works of Roy Chapman Andrews, jump- started my life's obsession with Asia and its creatures.

Gallos de Floyd and Other Memories

Getting the "Gallo de Cielo" painting below from Tom Russell jogged my memory and made me dig up some photos from the early 80's of my late mentor Floyd Mansell, his proud roosters, and one of him hunting with me and his then teen- aged son Phil (whose daughter is older today than he was in the photo).

Of Floyd (who appears in many scenes in Querencia- the- book) I wrote to Tom:

"Found these 1984 photos by Betsy Huntington of my late mentor Floyd Mansell and his roosters I thought might be of interest-- historically anyway!

"Floyd was unusual. Arkansas hillbilly by origin (though half Lebanese in addition to Scots- Irish-- there is a strain of Irish gamefowl called "Mansells"), he ran off to war in the Pacific at 16. Then returned, went to college and got a master's, "turned liberal, became a Catholic, and married an Indian. My family still doesn't know what to think!"

"He moved here in the 60's to work for the BIA, taught, coached, and was at one time or another mayor, principal, baseball coach, and guidance counselor. He was a Golden Gloves champ and a serious amateur boxer and taught that too. His politics if not culture never wavered from well to the Left of mine, but he remained not only a naturalist of daunting knowledge and skill-- several academic papers cite him-- but also a hunter, gunner, bowhunter, sighthound man (my real teacher there) and as long as it was legal and before the advent of brutal "slashers", cockfighter. As a boxer I think he identified with the gallos.

"He raised ten kids-- nine of his own, one a grandson he adopted-- with his half- Navajo, half Choctaw wife Wanda who is still around and still a friend. I miss him."



Phil was shooting a Mossberg pump with the casual ease, accuracy, and arrogance of a young natural; Floyd an Italian- made version of a 19th century caplock double. I had the kind of gun I never see anymore: an LC Smith Ideal grade 12 on the light frame that neither weighed much (even with 28" barrels) or cost much. I shot it well; made a terrific long shot toward the end of that day that culminated in my wading an arroyo flood to retrieve the bird after a sudden thunderstorm. I sold it, of course...

Rant's a work of art

How cool is this? Talented artist and friend Duene Raper of Pinedale asked me for a good photo of livestock guardian dog Rant a while back. The other day she mentioned "Rant is hanging on the art room wall" at the senior center, and I was welcome to take the piece home if I liked it. As soon as I saw it, I snatched it off the wall, showed if off, and brought it home. It's beautiful and Jim and I love it. Thanks so much Duene!

BEST Coursing photos

Herb Wells of Alpaugh CA, for all California's problems still the field HQ of coursing, is perhaps the best photographer of running dogs EVER. A small sampler.



The second reminds me of an old coursing print.

Separated at Birth?

I finally figured out who the Roman- nosed Chinese "Xigou" hounds reminded me of: the late Edward Gorey's Doubtful Guest. Look at those profiles!

Flock Flight

I never tire of watching the great winter flocks of birds like starlings, moving with eerie grace like some superorganism, supposedly by obeying very simple rules. (Photo, sent anonymously a year or two ago, by Manuel Presti; thanks, PD!)

This is most obvious when birds are under attack.Bill Kessler sent this amazing YouTube filmed in the Netherlands of a flock being harassed by a sparrowhawk, which eventually splits the "organism" in half, making it fission like an amoeba.

Richard Barnes' Animal Logic, a wonderful book of photographs which also features things like deconstructed museum dioramas and skulls (deconstructed in this case a Good Thing) has an excellent selection of photos of starlings flocking in Rome.

(Animal Logic also has an essay by the always quotable Jonathan Rosen which may show up in Commonplace Book soon).

Aunt Eudora

Our friend Marilyn Taylor is the poet laureate of Wisconsin as well as mostly a formalist, a so- called "New Traditionalist". Though hardly stuffy, as this excerpt from an old favorite about a retired midwestern lady totally in command of the situation, demonstrates.

From "Aunt Eudora in Paris":

Somewhere in this vast and graceful city
there stands a little café venerable;
Eudora finds its tiles and sideboards pretty
and seats herself behind a tiny table.

Thinking it an admirable venue
for practicing her skills in la francais,
Eudora spreads before herself a menu—
LaRousse a handy finger-lick away.

A waiter, expert in the art of sneering
creatively, the way Parisians do,
addresses her while fingering his earring:
Madame, we have no hamburgers for you.

Eudora lifts one eyebrow, pats her hair,
and with a queenly, autocratic look
says: Vas faire foutre a la vache, monsieur!
and turns again, serenely, to her book.

Mongol Tazis?

I never saw a tazi in Mongolia but there is evidence they exist, as in this folk painting. It is a common genre but this is the only one I ever saw that had tazis, never mind a Kazakh eagler.

Andrew brought me back this wonderful little study in another modern style-- I have a horse and falcon done in a similar way, though not as nice.

Then there is the pop image of Mongols, this time from the eXile where it headed an old War Nerd column. I think he is supposed to be Jingiz-- looks a bit like the John Wayne version(Google if you think I am kidding). Love the kilt...

Real dogs? Michelle Morgan snapped this probable cross-- tazi or taigan X flock protector I suspect.

But the nearest to the black dog of the first painting are foothill intergrades between the mountain taigans and the steppe tazis in Kyrgizstan (photos by Andrey Kovalenko).

Quick Updates with Historical Musings

Libby found a link to Tom Russell's paintings, mentioned below, at Rainbow Man gallery in Santa Fe. Good bio too.

Asian art seems a continuing interest to readers here. Eric Wilcox sent this Edo white gos. (The screens below are also Edo).

On the Edo era: David Zincavage links to an Economist piece by one Henry Tricks that starts in tranquility but ends more darkly:

"There is a deep-rooted respect for others, so ingrained that ground staff at Narita airport bow to departing planes as they taxi to the runway. And there is a subtle coercion, like an invisible hand on society’s collar, based on centuries of ancestor worship that has made many customs immutable. The attitudes have been shaped partly by the physical landscape of Japan, which packs one of the most crowded populations on earth onto narrow plains, bounded by sea and inhospitable mountains. For centuries the main activity has been rice farming, which requires communal planting, weeding, watering and harvesting, rather than the rugged individualism of American and European agriculture...."

"At times it feels as if the outside world does not exist. ...

[I]t is the Edo era, the peculiar two-and-a-half-century time capsule from 1603 to 1868, that casts the longest shadow. It was the time when a newly unified Japan turned its back on the outside world, shut its borders to almost all foreigners, stopped its people travelling abroad and forbade Japanese émigrés from returning to the country on pain of death. Each person was given his exact rank in society–in descending order: samurai, farmer, craftsman, merchant and outsider—and Japan went for 265 years without wars or revolutions. Much of this era is known as the sakoku jidae or “closed-country period”, and it was centred on Edo, now Tokyo, while the emperor was cloistered in Kyoto. At first glance, it seems like the epitome of the dark ages—a medieval equivalent of North Korea or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, ruled by an all-powerful family of shoguns, or military dictators, named Tokugawa. They handed on power for 14 generations, and kept the citizens in line through a byzantine network of spies and informants. The execution grounds can still be visited in Tokyo. Ordinary criminals might be crucified, boiled, burned or chopped in half: only the lucky samurai got to disembowel themselves.

"The gore, of course, has gone, but it seems to me that something of the Edo era shimmers just below the surface of modern Japan."

Not every society, even one that produces great artists and warriors, harbors the same dreams. Nor are all worthy ends worth some prices. But perhaps in times of terrible travail, as Japan is undergoing now, social cohesiveness may be an advantage...

Commonplace Book

A not- so- obvious one from the samurai- artist Musashi, one of painter Tom Quinn's idols:

"Do not need too many weapons."

Not.. too many...

Gallo...

... de Cielo!

This whimsical portrait of Tom Russell's celestial fighting rooster came to live at Casa Q for my 61st birthday, as Tom and Libby conspired. Or as he put it, "...that was one we kept in our private collection but it wanted to move to Magdalena near the other wild birds."

(In addition to his being a songwriter Tom is an acclaimed artist who does many of his album covers-- see "Wounded Heart" below-- and book covers as well).

Gallo joins the Hans Windgassen portrait of Les Girls, by my left elbow at this desk where I write.


Tom sings what is to my knowledge the only corrida about a brave rooster here.

Two albums with the song: Tom here; Joe Ely's Border- flavored cover, with Mexican- style guitar and accordion here.

(Got a link to that version too, recorded in Italy--!! One must wonder what the Italian audience made of a bunch of Texans singing about a heroic chicken...)

Riches

Yumm. On Friday, husband Jim had to make a run to Farson for some small hay bales to use to make a den for a pregnant livestock guardian dog (we feed big bales to the sheep). Our friend and beekeeper Jim Hodder made us a great trade - one of my wolf books for a GALLON of his honey and a few dozen fresh eggs. Delicious additions to our larder, which is lined with 25-pound bags of flour, rice and beans. I bake two loaves of honey oat bread on weekends, and couldn't imagine making it without our local honey. Gotta tell ya, I'm feeling rich.

Beauty, and its opposite

Many of the most pleasant parts of my day involve encounters lasting only a few seconds, and sometimes as long as a few minutes, but they all involve beauty found in nature. The snowy grouse (Greater Sage Grouse) were out nibbling on sage along the Wind River Front near Boulder while we were hauling hay. Beautiful birds, and we saw a large scattering of them.

We had another storm dump a bunch of new snow, and nearly 70 head of mule deer traversed through our place – something odd enough to attract the attention of our horses (and burro). We’re much more accustomed to our pronghorn antelope.


A few weeks ago, a small herd of pronghorn moved in to join our sheep herd in the river pasture, which is surprising because of the amount of trees and tall brush present. Pronghorn like to have big sight distances, but apparently the frozen river provides a speedy exit, as this group demonstrates. That’s an ancient wooden stock driveway over the river, which we’ve used for both sheep and cattle herds. That route has been used for about 100 years, taking livestock from the desert to the mountain.

While beauty is evident here every day, last week we had five days where the county I live in exceeded federal standards for the amount of ozone in the air. Ozone is the primary component of smog, and we appear to have a unique situation that occurs here with our winter energy development program.

Ozone in rural areas like that of Sublette County appears to form when there is a mixture of bright sunlight on uniform snowcover, a temperature inversion, and the presence of precursor emissions (including nitrogen oxides from combustion engines, and volatile organic compounds). When an inversion hits this basin, and the conditions are right, this bad air is then trapped, like a lid sealing a pot.

One afternoon it was so bad that I drove up the river to the spot where much of the development occurs, and this was the view. This was at 3:30 in the afternoon. It was similar to driving through the smoke generated from a forest fire – it became dark enough that the lights came on for all the equipment and vehicles in the area. When I stepped out to take a photo, with pounding headache by that time, the smell was powerful – would have made you fearful to light a match.

Just three hours earlier, I snapped this shot of a rough-legged hawk hunting in a grassy meadow, with a few mule deer watching compatibly nearby.

Our elevated ozone levels usually only occur for a few days a year, but five days in a row so far were miserable. Much is being done by both industry and air quality regulators, and I expect work to continue to resolve this admittedly limited but severe pollution problem in an otherwise awe-inspiring landscape.

Illustrated Gun (and Asian Hawk Art)

As part of my downsizing/ upgrading I bought my scrimshaw grips a new gun (1911 .45 of course), a Kimber Ultra Carry II with night sights. Mel at Ron Peterson's threw in an ingenious holster that can be used right or left side, cross or regular draw, with no alterations.

The design is based on a drawing I did, a composite from these (life- sized) Japanese goshawk screens (click on them to enlarge-- they should go up twice), with a pose from one and Siberian "North- of- the Waste White" plumage from another.


Japanese falconry probably ultimately derives from the Chinese. Jess at Desert Windhounds sent me these 18th century images of such a gos and a gyr by Castiglione, the Jesuit painter at the Chinese court, who combined western and Chinese techniques. (He did tazis too-- I'll get to them...)



Update: Jess sent me another image. This gos wears a rooster feather on its tail to make it more visible in cover, as the ones flown by the Naxi in southwestern China still do.

Cool

From "Max":

I believe I know that guy (;-); (pic is from 1998 but I have plenty more). He IS cool, and can out- drink me:

Xigou

Sir Terence Clark has just returned from China. He writes:

"I was in Shaanxi Province of China in October 2010 with the Xigou (pronounced See-gow) hunters, one of whom had previously asked me whether I thought his hound was a Saluki. After examining a whole range of these hounds, I can only say that superficially they look very like desert bred Salukis of the kind that you find elsewhere in the northern range of Turkey and Iran."

Terence thinks they came to Central Asia from the west, from Persia and Arabia. I rather think they went the other way; I'm not sure the evidence is in yet to prove either of our theories. What is for certain is that they have been in both places a long time! Tomb images and other art places them firmly in western China by AD 700-- see "Prince Xangui's Tomb" where the dog has the local roman nose, about which more in a moment. Terence continues:

"...the Chinese Xigou are quite varied in their appearance. Some have a distinctly banana-shaped nose, but this would seem to go back at least to the 7th century, if the tomb painting of Prince Zhanghuai is accurate. Others have a normal Saluki nose. Some have a roached back, but others a straight topline. Some are very broad across the chest so that the elbows seem to stick out, but most have a normal Saluki front. Most have quite thick ear fringes but only skimpy feathering on the tail, like the Tazys of Central Asia. A few have rather rounded front feet but most have a good long, well-arched Saluki foot. The colours are mainly solid black, white, red with black mask and fringes, grey and dark brindle. I did not see any particoloureds, grizzles or smooths, though I was told a smooth variety existed."

Here is a typical young black pup of the local type. Blacks are rare in the Arab countries but appear sporadically from Turkey east and are apparently common in China.

Some pretty saluki- type dogs:


The nose:

Which contrary to some saluki people has been around a long time. Remember the Prince's tomb, and look at that profile:

Another:

A Xian figurine also ca 700:

Terence also got to go hunting. "Hunting was a free for all! I saw as many as six or eight run at the same time and the hare, smaller but similar to the European hare, does not have much chance to escape on the flat, sparsely covered cultivated fields."

Hungry cultures are not as "sporting" as ones at play...

The Fragrance of Grass

Guy de la Valdene's new memoir The Fragrance of Grass (title from a line in a Jim Harrison poem) is out, and it is wonderful, even better than his earlier good books I think.

It is an unusual combination of almost Proustian (but rural) memoir and sporting reminiscence, perhaps with echoes of Turgenev's "notebooks" as well, haunted by time in a not- unpleasant if sometimes melancholy way. It is an account of growing up in France and America, with many dogs, a lot of food (not indulged in a "piggy" way but as a part of life), and enough shooting both humble and elevated to allow it to be reviewed in hook and bullet venues though it quite transcends that category. As I am sure he would admit, he has had a fortunate life.

I find his recurring emphasis on the importance of dogs and the sadness inevitably induced by their short lives especially touching. He isn't weepy-- no "I knew an old dog who died" tales, as we used to call the genre at Gray's, soon warped into "I knew an old Jeep that died" and worse-- but just an honest love for our necessary companions, something he shares with his friend Tom McGuane, who once sent me a letter of condolence on a spaniel's death. Some people just get it.

The details of (very far from fancy at home) life in Brittany are fascinating and not at all, to use that word again, "elevated". Of course my mother never shot an elephant with "Pop" Percival-- her first and last game animal, incidentally.

His tales of farmers' drives in France, now long gone, beat those of later stuffy commercial ones. His driven- shoot set piece and tour de force is the story of a perfect day in his twenty- first year, when he has his uncle's gift pair of Holland Royals modified and finally shoots, magically, with them at the book's fanciest shoot. For the first time, he does so well that his raffish mentor doesn't "poach" his birds.

He also summered one year in his teens on a Highland estate where he was given a choice of a Holland 7mm Royal and a 6.5 Mannlicher bolt (WITHOUT "un- sporting" scopes) for stags. He wounded one and acquired a lasting distaste for deer hunting, though he honestly admits he still loves venison, if not haggis ("shit pudding").

These days he shoots partridge in Montana behind easygoing dogs like working cockers, and quail on his Florida farm. At a certain age, close or familiar begins to look exactly right. "The past is a different country".

The only thing I don't love about the book is one of the blurbs. Howell Raines says the book "...confronts the haunting question of whether the beauty of the hunt can ever justify its savagery." That is not what a hunter's ambivalence is about-- I very much doubt this hunter and his dogs will ever turn vegetarian.

When I got the galleys last fall I wrote Guy the next day: "Got it yesterday and sat up reading with a couple of glasses of vodka, marking passages and reading aloud to Libby, until I finished at 1 AM.

"It is your best I think. It is bravely honest about things nobody talks about, and funny and sad and haunting. You "get" dogs exactly, and being an aging hunter and lover of our world and all the vanishing things."

I'll stand by that.

From the Commonplace Book

A poem by Gavin Maxwell. He doubtless did others but this one imagining wild Iceland from home is the only one I know. It resonates for this traveler stuck at home at least for the present...

Slowly through a Land of Stone

So although no ghost was scotched
We were happy while we watched
Ravens from their walls of shale
Cruise around the rotting whale,

Watched the sulphur basins boil
Loops of steam uncoil and coil,
While the valley fades away
To a sketch of Judgment Day.

Rows of books around me stand,
Fence me round on either hand;
Through that forest of dead words
I would hunt the living birds-

Great black birds that fly alone-
Slowly through a land of stone,
And the gulls who weave a free
Quilt of rhythm on the sea.

Three Small Falcons, and Thoughts on Speciation...

Anne Price of the Raptor Education Foundation flies the excellent taiga merlin Tish, who has been drawn by Vadim Gorbatov "bulldogging" a starling (Cowgirl Tish).

We were discussing Cheetah who is half taita (or teita) falcon. The species lives in the river gorges of eastern and southern Africa-- I have seen nests near Victoria Falls. Though small it is very stout, broad- shouldered, short- tailed, large- beaked, long- toed, and heavily wing- loaded. It has rusty marks on its head. In fact but for that it is somewhat isolated, and lives near dry forest rather than desert, it could be considered the smallest member of the Barbary falcon (Falco babylonicus) group, the desert "peregrine"-- the two subspecies, eastern and western, were once considered races of the peregrine until they were found breeding sympatricly with other races. This species is found from Morocco to western Mongolia, where I have seen THEIR nest sites, the western birds known as Barbary falcons and the eastern as red- naped shahins. The Barbs are little; some rn's are bigger than peregrines.

Look at the directions evolution has taken small falcons. The teita (a male, very small, about which more in a minute) is a tiny peregrine but stouter; the American aplomado has gone in a direction resembling an Accipiter with a falcon head, long, lanky, long tailed; the merlin is a mini- desert falcon built for swift pursuit.

Second pic: teita, unhappy Tish. Both weigh plus or minus 180 g; "little" Cheetah over 500.

Third: Anne with same. LOOK at proportions!

Fourth, fifth: Red Nape in Almaty Kz breeding project where she dwarfs a male Siberian peregrine-- yes, females are bigger but she was huge, though still with those broad shahin shoulders like a teita or Barb. Incidentally they are called Lashyn-- my dog's name-- there.


Last, male (I think) rn in Kyrgizstan.

Are the peregrine relatives, probably separated only 12,000 years or so, species or not? Check this scholarly pdf and get back to me...