hunting
tsmith | October 27, 2014 Left to right, Granny Beck, my Grandma June, and Great-Great Grandma Bertha, circa 1961. Who knows what was on the menu that day.
My Great-Grandpa and Granny Beck were, in some ways, ahead of their time. My Grandpa’s mom and step-dad, they both went through scandalous divorces and then switched partners with another couple, Granny Orpha marrying Wade and my Grandpa’s dad Lee marrying Wade’s ex-wife, Edna. Orpha and Wade raised 5 of Orpha’s boys together, and had a daughter after the divorce/remarriage.
By the time I was born, my Granny Beck was in her 80s, and I have only vague…
gregladen | January 13, 2014UPDATE (March 27 2015): US gives Texan rhino hunter an import permit
A Texan who won an auction to shoot an endangered black rhino in Namibia has been given a US permit to import the trophy if he kills one.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service said hunting an old rhino bull helps to increase the population.
There was an outcry when Corey Knowlton won the auction last year, with animal rights activists decrying it. It's not yet clear when the hunt will happen.
Namibia is home to some 1,500 black rhino, a third of the world's total.
The US agency issuing the permit said that importing the carcass…
aardvarchaeology | September 23, 2013My maternal grandpa Ingemar Leander worked as a sales agent of the Swedish Match Company in Punjab in the 30s before he got married. It was the adventure of his lifetime. Here's the story of his that I remember best.
Once when he went crocodile hunting on the river the party was a little clumsy and startled their prey into the water from the sandbank the animals had been basking on. Only one crocodile stayed behind and was shot. This turned out to be because it was in poor health. When they gutted the animal they found that a bone had pierced its stomach from inside.
It was the arm bone of a…
gregladen | February 19, 2013I just put up a post in 10,000 Birds reporting on a recent study of duck stamp sales and duck hunting. There have been changes in recent years in the patterns of both waterfowl hunting and the purchase and use of federal duck stamps. Waterfowl hunters are required to have a duck stamp, and about 90% of the funds raised through the sale of these artistic quasi-philatic devices are used to secure wildlife preservation areas. For decades, duck population numbers and duck stamp sales were closely correlated, but recently this correlation has broken down. Read the post to find out the details and…
gregladen | July 18, 2011The first crane I ever saw is a bird burned permanently in my memory. It came out of nowhere and flew close by, staying in view lit by a nearly setting sun for about five wing beats. A gun was raised to shoot it but the trigger was not pulled.
I was a teenager, and the brother of a co-worker invited me to go hunting with him. The idea was not for me to actually hunt, but rather, for me to see what hunting was all about. It was a social gesture and a manly gesture. If I like hunting perhaps I would join one of their hunting groups, get a firearm, learn to shoot, and become one of the boys…
gregladen | February 2, 2011Once you've killed the monkey, you need to carry it back to camp. Slit the tail, near the end, and poke the head through the slit, so the tail makes a handy strap.
Here's a detail:
gregladen | January 31, 2011An Efe (Pygmy) man making poison arrows for use in killing monkeys.
Ituri Forest, Zaire. Photograph Copyrighted 1986 Greg Laden
The arrows are thin darts of wood, often made of palm. Large marantacae leaves serve as a bowl and as a ladle. The poison includes a large number of ingredients, and the specific recipes vary a great deal (and are often guarded). This concoction included the juice pounded from a vine that contains strychnine. About seven arrows are fired at a monkey, up in the trees, per strike (on average) and it takes about two strikes to bring down a monkey. Several dozen…
gregladen | December 6, 2010Is this thing on? Hello? Hello? ....
Ah, thats better. Comcast, which every day seems to do something to piss me off, had a major sub-regional outage for the last several hours, it would seem. So, we've been floating free of the Internet and a few things have accumulated.
First, this: Remember the rape charges brought against WikiLeak's Julian Assange? It would seem that with the latest Wikileaks leaks, the nature of and the stakes related to these accusations are taking on a new form, and we are starting to see conspiracy theories with a misogynist slant emerging to excuse Mr. Assange…
zooillogix | October 29, 2009Straight from Katie and Andrew's closets we bring you this Mountain Dew-soaked photographic essay.
An explosive herbivore bursts forth from your chest
So many, many more below the fold...
Oh my sternum? Yes, it's real bear
Spirit of the Casino
A rare candid glimpse into pre-Columbian North America
We count four offensive things in this shirt. How many can you find?
Seizure inducing dolphins
T-Rexes fight on the moon
grrlscientist | June 13, 2009tags: book review, Falconer on the Edge, A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West, falconry, hawking, Rachel Dickinson
Like most married people, Rachel Dickinson thought she knew her husband quite well after years of marriage. But one evening, he surprised her by unexpectedly bringing home a small brown paper bag containing an injured kestrel. You see, Dickinson's husband, Living Bird magazine editor Tim Gallagher, was a lapsed falconer without any birds, until this kestrel, Strawberry, reawakened his latent passion. As the bond between her husband and his tiny…
edyong | January 13, 2009As a species, our unflinching obsession with size is just as apparent in our dealings with other animals as it is in our personal lives. Fishermen prize the biggest catches and they're are obliged to throw the smallest specimens back in. Hunters also value the biggest kills; they provide the most food and make the flashiest trophies. This fixation isn't just a harmless one - by acting as a size-obsessed super-predator, humans are reshaping the bodies of the species we hunt, at a remarkable pace and to a dramatic degree.
Predators already put a lot of pressure on their prey to evolve new ways…