"Freedom"

"Sometimes I feel like I'm almost gone..." And now he is. Richie Havens has passed away at age 72, but this piece of music will live forever.



If anyone is still looking for music to put on an interstellar probe, I nominate this.

Bad career move

Red-tailed hawk takes on nesting bald eagle. Even for a juvenile redtail, this seems like a spectacularly optimistic (or perhaps desperate) attack, and it ends exactly as badly as you might think. If you haven't seen the video already, be warned it's somewhat graphic...as nature often is.

Season's end

A funny thing happened today. After yesterday's blizzard—the forecast was for about an inch, but we got six inches or so, with winds gusting around 45 miles per hour—today was glorious: pleasantly warm, sunny, and dead calm. Perfect hawking weather. As I fed Stekoa on the fist in the back yard this afternoon, basking in sunshine with my boots in the snow, it occurred to me that, with daylight saving time having just begun, I could easily have gone hawking after work. But I didn't—and I was surprisingly okay with it.

Technically, the hawking season goes through the end of the month, but we usually end early so as not to interfere unduly with the rabbits' breeding season. Wise hunters don't like to impact next season's production any more than farmers want to eat their seed corn. But there was more to it than that...it was simply enough.

Our flying time this season was severely limited by my work schedule, not much more than weekends really, but despite that I consider it a very successful year. Stekoa was both stylish and efficient, a six-times intermewed gamehawk in his prime. Thanks to several factors—a decent rabbit population after several below-average years, more careful weight management, and perhaps a more judicious selection of hawking grounds—Stekoa caught fewer mice than ever before, reflecting a keener focus on rabbits. From the NAFA meet in November through the end of January, I don't remember coming home without at least one rabbit in the bag—taking game is not my definition of success, but it is a pretty good indicator. And even when he didn't score, he always showed good sport.

What I now believe was our last hunt of the season, on Saturday, is a case in point. In the field were Jessica, Ellie, Pat and Shea Stull, and Shea's friend Rachel. [Photo by Pat above.] Just a day before the blizzard swept through, the temperature was in the 60s, and I was a bit concerned that Stekoa might opt to sit in a treetop and sunbathe rather than hunt with us; instead, he followed as brilliantly as ever. We flushed half a dozen rabbits—rabbits that, having survived into March, must be considered the most difficult of the season—and got good flights on all of them. Nothing brought to bag, but I was exhilarated. The hunt was followed by a sociable dinner back at the Stull's house (thanks, Trisia!), and when the snow and wind came overnight, I was content to sit the day out, and to contemplate a long series of days off.

A good hawking season behind me, a spring and summer's worth of fishing, garden projects, perhaps some travel ahead of me...I'm contented, and I find it wise not to underestimate the significance of contentment.

Dekes

J: "So what's with all the decoys, anyway? You fly hawks, but you don't shoot, do you?"

M: "Those are for the bathtub."

J: "You know, most people just have the little yellow rubber duckies."

M: "I like them better grown up."

Spillover reviewed

The purpose of this book is not to make you more worried. The purpose of this book is to make you more smart.

—David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

I've been looking forward to this one for a while now, and Spillover was not a disappointment. My wife commented, "I can't believe I got you a disease book for Valentine's Day." I responded that Spillover isn't a disease book, it's an ecology book, and I recommend it be read in that light. One of my favourite science writers (Song of the Dodo, Monsters of God, and a couple of essay collections from his "Natural Acts" column), Quammen establishes a few central recurring themes in the first two pages:

• "The subject of animal disease and the subject of human disease are, as we'll see, strands of one braided cord."
• "...Humanity is a kind of animal, inextricably connected with other animals: in origin and in descent, in sickness and in health."
• "...Everything, including pestilence, comes from somewhere."

Throughout the book, he delivers well-researched facts leavened with tales from the field and his dry humour, often in the form of asides to the reader. There are fairly extensive endnotes, but Quammen (or possibly the publisher) has chosen not to clutter the text with superscript which could interfere with the flow of the story—and there is a flow, for Quammen is a good storyteller. (He's published several works of fiction as well, though I haven't read these.)

The first section, "Pale Horse", is about Hendra, a relatively obscure virus originating in fruit bats and affecting horses and, to a lesser extent, humans. Quammen uses Hendra to introduce the overall topic of zoonosis as well as to define related concepts such as reservoir hosts and amplifier hosts, spillover and emergence, and to make the case that "they [outbreaks of zoonotic disease] are not simply happening to us, they represent the unintended consequence of things we are doing."

The tension increases with "Thirteen Gorillas", starring the much better-known (if not much better understood) Ebola. This one may also come from fruit bats and, as devastating as it can be on humans, its rapid lethality has kept it from making the leap from epidemic to pandemic. However, it may be affecting our close relatives, gorillas, on the population level. (If anyone wants to see foreshadowing here, I won't discourage them.) This section concludes with a key quote: "People and gorilla, horses and duikers and pigs, monkeys and chimps and bats and viruses: We're all in this together."

Quammen touches on the mathematics of contagion in "Everything Comes From Somewhere"—that phrase again—employing the vehicle of malaria and, mercifully, making us sit through very little mathematics. One of the topics addressed is the differential effects of even closely related diseases, for malaria is several. (Differential effects will come into play later, in the chapter on HIV.) "Dinner at the Rat Farm" examines SARS as a lucky escape, an epidemic that could have been so much worse than it was (and one that may yet get another bite at the apple).

Bacterial zoonoses such as psittacosis, Q fever, and Lyme disease get their turn in "The Deer, the Parrot, and the Kid Next Door". I particularly like the section on Lyme disease, which makes it clear that even those who do appreciate disease outbreaks as an ecological phenomenon often fail to grasp the ecological particulars. Although Lyme disease is closely linked in the public mind with white-tailed deer, the rise and fall of deer populations is almost irrelevant to the incidence of Lyme disease—it's the population of certain small mammals that make the difference, and the disparities between intact and fragmented ecosystems. ("The unintended consequences of things we are doing.")

In "Going Viral", however, we return to the group of pathogens likeliest to cause The Next Big One. The chapter begins with herpes B in macaques, goes from there to the larger topic of viral biology in general, and then to RNA viruses more particularly: "they jump species a lot". The succeeding chapter, "Celestial Hosts", explores the ongoing research into why so many viruses—including Hendra, Nipah, SARS, Marburg, and probably Ebola—seem to be linked to bats.

The longest chapter, "The Chimp and the River", is about the history and origins of the current Big One, HIV. It includes an extended imagining of a crucial spillover event; the passage dealing with Quammen's hypothetical Voyager is a bit out of character with the rest of the book, but it deals with an important dichotomy. The biogeography and genetic diversity of the human immunodeficiency viruses indicate that there have been at least a dozen separate spillovers from primate hosts into human ones, but the global AIDS pandemic (HIV-1 type M) results from a single event—a single event recently pinpointed in both time and space with a surprising degree of accuracy, though we're probably at the limit of resolution.

As with malaria, HIV is a family of pathogens, some more transmissible and more virulent than others, rather than a single entity. HIV-2 has never really expanded much beyond west Africa; most of the HIV-1 types are even more limited in scope. But for that one spillover event, HIV-1 type M remains, at least for a time, a virus of chimpanzees, and AIDS an unrecognized condition, barely distinguishable from the background noise of disease in central and western Africa.

The book closes with "It Depends", in which Quammen tells a tale of tent caterpillars taking over his Montana town, devastating the town's trees, and just as abruptly vanishing, victims of a virus. It is in this chapter, with Quammen noting an important ecological similarity between the tent caterpillars and humankind, that he writes "this book is to make you more smart", for there is an important ecological dissimilarity between the caterpillars and us as well. Can humanity's behavioural flexibility prevent, or at least postpone, humanity's own meltdown? As the chapter title notes...it depends.

Highly recommended, especially as a companion/followup to Laurie Garrett's wider-ranging The Coming Plague (1995).

Related post: "Stellaluna and Wilbur will kill us all"

Kitties!

Chas aptly describes these pictures as "somewhere between 'very interesting' and Paleolithic nightmare territory." Click the link. Do it.

Useful

J: "Well, I think you’re useful. I like all the ways you’re useful."

M: "Right, I’m like a Swiss Army knife: useful, versatile, pretty sharp..."

J: "And you’ve been around for ages!"

No one said life in the wild would be easy...

Jess sent me this yesterday:

The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief and pain,
For promis'd joy!

—Robert Burns, from "To a Mouse"

Eagles

"Idle hands are the devil's workshop," as my dad once muttered to great comic effect...

For real eagles, read this.

Straggler

Little time for blogging lately; I might eventually write about the Nebraska Falconers' Association meet, but first I wanted to round out the North American Falconers' Association meet with one last post.

One of the most memorable characters from the 2012 NAFA meet in Kearney was neither a falconer nor a hawk, nor a dog, but a pigeon. Specifically, a brown pigeon with a grey rump who, having been brought to the meet by a falconer, escaped from the falconer's truck. Now, I'm no pigeon expert, but I would have expected the pigeon to make a few ascending circles to get its bearings and then line out for home, wherever that may have been. (I didn't inquire and so don't know whose pigeon it was.) Instead, it made the Holiday Inn parking lot and adjacent weathering yard its manor, hawk-infested though it may have been.

We arrived on Tuesday evening, at which point the pigeon was already well-ensconced. Sometimes perching in a tree above the redtails and Harris' hawks, sometimes flying lazy circles around the parking lot and weathering yard, sometimes strutting among the assembled SUVs and pickups, the pigeon was always in evidence. Ellie and I made a semi-concerted attempt to grab it, each of us sneaking nonchalantly around the corner of a hawking rig in a pincer movement, but the pigeon was wary; it had already evaded a few such efforts by others attending the meet, as well as the noose carpet that a more methodical would-be trapper had employed. No, this pigeon, having made good its escape, was determined not to return to captivity, though neither did it seem interested in travel—the Holiday Inn, it seems, was good enough.

(Lest anyone think that our look-casual-and-grab technique was hopelessly naïve, I did bare-hand a pigeon in downtown Lincoln a couple of hours before my wedding to Jess, wearing a tuxedo no less. I was wearing a tuxedo, not the pigeon.)

I helped break down the weathering yard late Friday afternoon, pulling posts and rolling fence, and of course the pigeon was still there, watching the deconstruction and presumably breathing a sigh of relief that all the hawks and falcons had gone. And it was still there late Saturday morning as we loaded the station wagon and pulled out; we were headed for home, and the pigeon apparently thought it was home. As we drove off, we wondered at its fate; maybe it will integrate into one of the flocks of feral pigeons in downtown Kearney, a mile or two north; maybe it will discover too late that not all Cooper's hawks are tethered to bowperches. I rather enjoy not knowing.

Closing ceremony

One new feature at this year's NAFA meet was a central European-style closing ceremony, hosted by German falconer (and newly elected IAF vice-president) Thomas Richter. Game taken during the meet is laid out on evergreen boughs, songs specific to each game species are played on horns (or, in this case, a recording is played on a speaker), and all present observe a few moments of silence as a gesture of appreciation for the quarry that makes the hunt possible, nourishing both hawks and our spirits.

[Donna Vorce and Shea Stull gathering cedar branches.]

[The square laid out.]

[Game ceremony by torchlight.]

Note to young falconers: The format can be different, but never miss a chance to honour your quarry.

Prize

I was spectacularly unsuccessful at the NAFA raffles, but Ellie picked up a small treasure on a $1 ticket: this apparently hand-drawn illumination.

Unfortunately, I know nothing of this picture's provenance, or even which raptor is depicted. My first impression is of an Old World kite or, more likely, one of the small forest eagles—a snake-eagle or something similar. That white tail ought to be diagnostic, but a quick look at Ferguson-Lees & Christie (Raptors of the World) yielded no definitive matches. Informed speculation is welcomed, as are translations from anyone who can read the inscriptions in what I take to be Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) but might be Arabic.

Meanwhile, this awaits framing; it will eventually find an honoured space in the Farrell-Churchill household.

My week in review

I had a somewhat odd NAFA meet. I'm always delighted when it's just two hours down the road in Kearney, but I had to work Monday and Tuesday, so I hawked in Lincoln after work on Tuesday and didn't get in to Kearney 'til late. Then I had to return to Lincoln on Wednesday to pick up Ellie, so I hawked in Lincoln again. High winds assured that, once in Kearney, I get in less flying than I had intended, while a series of headaches both literal and figurative meant that I spent less time socialising than I might have otherwise. The result is that I felt strangely detached from all the goings-on.

Still, it was good to have the girls with me, and good to see old friends again. Several of them had missed me in the five years since my last NAFA meet, and a few expressed concern—a reminder that some of these see-you-in-November friendships transcend mere hunting-buddy status to become genuine friendships. Stekoa helped out by flying reasonably well even when it was too windy to find quarry; once the wind died down on Friday afternoon, he caught the second bunny he saw. Photos (by Jessica) from Thursday's and Friday's hunts follow.

 

Feedlot

Late Friday morning, we went for a brief starling hunt at a local feedlot. These starlings are hunted hard by the resident raptors—not just merlins, but also prairie falcons, Cooper's hawks, and sharp-shinned hawks—so they're wary, and we didn't get the high ringing flights generally preferred by merlin enthusiasts. Still, we did see a couple of good flights.

Diane Moller and her black merlin. [All these shots are by Jess.]

Launch.

Jeremy Bradshaw and his Richardson's merlin.

Closing with a flock of starlings, at just above cow level.

Following the flight.

Weathering

A brief tour of the weathering yard at the NAFA meet in Kearney...

White gyrfalcon. We nicknamed this one "the moose" for her size.

Some gyr hybrids.

Peregrines—blonde tundrius peregrines.

Tiercel prairie.

Gyr x merlin hybrid.

Richardson's merlin and jack.

And, moving to the other side of the yard...

Goshawks.

Redtails.

Harris' hawk.