i’ve been in ireland

It’s a glorious time of year to be in Ireland — green, green grass; lots of daffodils, trees just thinking about budding out. I’ve been blogging about the trip for The Atlantic and if you’re interested, you can follow the journey by clicking here.  Here’s the beginning of a post about canoeing in a lake near Killarny.

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Last evening I took such a lovely paddle around Ross Island in Lough Leane outside of Killarney. Nathan Kingerlee of Outdoors Ireland collected me from my hotel and I’m sure when he took a look at me (overweight middle-aged woman) he quickly recalculated how far we’d make it in the canoe. Nathan’s a young, strapping lad with close-cropped black hair and ruddy cheeks and hails from Killorglin, the small town that worships a wild goat annually during Puck Fair. He started Outdoors Ireland about five years ago and is making a go of it by selling adventure trips and teaching people how to do all manner of outdoorsy things. He’s smart and savvy and fully understands the role of carefully marketing his business. And because he’s a young guy, he blogs and tweets and is as comfortable around his computer as he is climbing a mountain.

The water was really high where the canoe was tethered — had innundated part of the forest — and canoeing out of there and toward the open water was a little like canoeing in a southern bayou. As we headed toward the lake, we passed mallards and a gray heron and Nathan told me to be on the lookout for a pair of nesting swans. [to read the rest of the post, click here.]

a mixed message

 

These discarded tulips in a dumpster behind some greenhouses at Cornell University caught my eye a couple of weeks ago when we had so much snow and it seemed as if spring would never, ever come. Of course, spring did come and although there are still a few piles of dirty snow in hanging on in the shadows of buildings, they’re sharing groundspace with crocuses and snowdrops.

green burial

The other day I went to Greensprings natural cemetary and nature preserve and witnessed a green burial. Although it was the beginning of March the snow was about thigh deep up on top of the hill outside Newfield, New York. Greensprings owns about a hundred acres and since opening a couple of years ago, has buried about sixty people.

Here’s a view of the open grave on the crest of the hill.

Mary Woodsen, Greensprings trustee, cuts and brings Norway spruce boughs to cover the dirt pile. Later, the family will place these boughs in the grave on top of the body.

A chair for the mother of the deceased young woman is placed near the open grave.

walking in the dark

It’s been snowy and dreary in Upstate New York. Here’s the beginning of a little piece I wrote for YourLifeIsATrip.com:

“It was a yak trax morning. Well, lately every morning’s been a yak trax morning because the snow just keeps falling and if I don’t wear those metal coils on my feet, I’ll keep falling as well. I take a walk with my friend Heather at 6:00 a.m. every day. I like to walk with Heather because she owns a reflective vest and I feel like she will be the first to go when we get hit by the salt truck that comes barreling around the corner. Me, I dress in blacks and browns and blend in beautifully with the landscape and the darkness. And during deer hunting season, I don’t go anywhere without Heather because I know I look like a big deer just begging to be shot.

Before we began walking in the pitch black – the shift happened somewhere in December – I used to look for animal tracks in the snow on the sidewalk. One morning I saw deer tracks followed by two sets of kitty tracks, then skunk tracks, and finally rabbit tracks — and this was all on my front sidewalk – leading me to conclude that I must stay awake one night to see if the animals actually meet in front of my house for a party or if they all have someplace to go. Now that it’s dark when I leave the house, I expect to actually run into some of these animals on the sidewalk but except for the long-haired black and white cat named Feisty they’ve all managed to avoid me – I suspect they’re lurking between the houses, waiting for me to pass before continuing with their early morning party scene (to read more click here).

the swamp at dawn

ivory-billed woodpecker news

I have to throw my hat in the ring and at least comment on this. Someone named Daniel Rainsong says he has photos of an Ivory-billed woodpecker in the Sabine River Basin in East Texas taken on December 29, 2009. Okay. Bring it on.

Here’s the beginning of a blog post written by Matt Mendenhall, associate editor at Birder’s World that does a great job of summarizing what’s known about this claim so far.

Woodpecker experts haven’t seen supposed Ivory-bill photos

At the risk of giving credibility to a possible hoax, here’s what we know about the latest report of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker sighting.

If Daniel Rainsong has photos of a living Ivory-billed Woodpecker, as this press release claims, he has not yet shown them to two leading Ivory-bill experts.

Van Remsen, curator of birds at Louisiana State University’s Museum of Natural Science and an adjunct professor of biological sciences at LSU, told me today that Rainsong visited him in Baton Rouge, “but he would not show me his photographic evidence. He said he had to develop them.”

The comment suggested that Rainsong used a film camera. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Remsen added. “I won’t comment until I see the evidence.” (click here to read the entire post . . .)

There is no one who would be more thrilled than I if this turned out to be true. For several years it was all-ivory-bill, all the time because my husband Tim Gallagher was one of the first to rediscover the species in Arkansas. Tim subsequently wrote about his rediscovery and Cornell’s efforts in his book The Grail Bird. I also wrote about the rediscovery in Audubon Magazine.

the art of the travel journal

Not falconry but I wrote this little piece for a website I contribute to and I thought some might find it interesting and even useful. Here’s the beginning:

“When I travel I always carry a little black moleskin journal that flips open like a reporter’s notebook. I also buy a new pen before a journey that I slip through the elasticized band that encircles the journal. This is my traveling kit – one in which I make notes in longhand and draw sketches to illustrate what I’m seeing. I imagine what I record is like a kindergarten version of what Mark Twain or Robert Louis Stevenson – two great 19th century diarists – might have recorded.
 
Often, when I read through my notebook after a trip, I’m struck by how things going on in the outside world tend to creep into my observations; how my remarks are guided by events that may or may not be in the front of my brain at the time; how I can completely miss the story in front of me in favor of a description of something like a mountain ash tree.” (click here to read more . . .)

Here’s a snippet from one of my pages, complete with cartoon drawing:

nice long post about golden eagles

I stumbled across this long post about golden eagles Aquila chrysaetos complete with a number of videos. This blog The Texas Cichlid Massacre is pretty interesting and covers topics as varied as paleontology, fish, wildlife, and crytozoology.  Please visit his blog to read the golden eagle post. If anyone is hankering for a dose of using golden eagles to hunt in Mongolia, below is one of the youtube videos from his blog:

another review of falconer

It was nice to see this little review this morning as part of a round-up of bird books in the Montreal Gazette:

“Speaking of the vanishing American West and its icons, I was thrilled to see Rachel Dickinson’s Falconer on the Edge (Houghton Mifflin, $25) about Steve Chindgren, a pioneer, a Western mountain man and, most of all, a hardcore falconer.

I once attended a falconry conference in Utah and I will never forget my adventure of running along with Steve full-tilt on frozen mud in a marsh as he chased after his beloved hunting peregrine. He is eccentric, fanatical, obsessive and truly dedicated to the sport of falconry. Not for the faint of heart, though. (to read more click here . . .)

whooping crane shot

This is from Birder’s World:

Whooping Crane shot, reward offered

A seven-year-old Whooping Crane — the only successful breeding female from the eastern migratory population — was shot and killed in western Indiana, near the town of Cayuga in central Vermillion County, officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the International Crane Foundation said today.

The crane, known as 17-02, and her mate, 11-02, hatched two chicks in summer 2006 and one in summer 2009 at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin. One of the 2006 birds survived. The parents have been the only adults in the eastern population to raise a chick and lead it to wintering grounds in Florida.

In late November, cranes 17-02 and 11-02 had stopped at a marsh in Indiana, a place they typically stop at on their southbound migration. Eva Szyszkoski, tracking field manager for the International Crane Foundation, observed the pair on November 28 during an aerial survey. On her return flight on Tuesday, December 1, 17-02 was missing. Ground tracker Jess Thompson raced to the area and found the bird dead near a ravine, not far from a rural county road. (click here to read more . . .)

fence collisions and sage grouse

The following is the beginning of a piece by Cat Urbigkit that showed up on Stephen Bodio’s Querencia blog yesterday:

Making headlines across the West of late is a two-page preliminary report issued by a Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologist noting that barbed wire fences pose a collision hazard to Greater Sage Grouse. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to meet its court-ordered February deadline to determine if sage grouse should be granted Endangered Species Act protections, so the report will come into play there. Those who oppose livestock grazing on public lands are also latching onto the report as another reason to rid the western range of its agricultural industry, and its associated fences.

But everyone might be reading more into the report than it merits. WG&F biologist Tom Christiansen noted it all began when two separate falconers provided incidental reports that grouse had been injured or killed on the top wire of certain fences located near important grouse areas. The area is just to the southeast of where we ranch, in the border area of Sublette and Sweetwater counties. This area is believed to have one of the largest concentrations of sage grouse on the planet. It’s falconer Steve Chindgren’s stomping grounds (the falconer who is the subject of Rachel Dickinson’s Falconer on the Edge).

According to Christiansen’s report, “One of these falconers subsequently began marking such fences with aluminum beverage cans in a volunteer effort to reduce these mortalities.” (Click here to read the rest of the post . . .)

If you are not familiar with this blog, I urge you to check it out. Several people post regularly including Cat Urbigkit, Matt Mullenix, and Steve Bodio and the topics range from falconry to coursing dogs to natural history.