Art Culture Politics
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Owls In Culture
Did you know Florence Nightingale had a pet Little Owl? She rescued it and named it Athena, after the Greek goddess, who was ssociated with owls (so much so that the binomial for this European species is Athene noctua). When Nightingale — the first person named after the English version of Firenza, by the way,…
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“Two Octopi”
I’ve seen a lot of John Singer Sargent’s work over the years, but never this delightfully pulsating oil painting of two octopuses of 1875 until very recently. Sargent was about 19 when he painted this, and it’s one of the first oils in his oeuvre. Cephalopods still had a bit of mystique about them in…
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Free Malheur NWR
It has now been more than two weeks since a ragtag group of armed men took over buildings at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Our nation’s representatives in the west have long been terrorized by a right-wing movement which wants to convert public land to their own profit wholesale. This has been well-funded…
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Turf and Owl
I’ve been reading Neil MacGregor’s Germany: Memories of a Nation, a deeply thought-provocking work even with its sprawling and superficial, in the best sense, scope. I wanted to make a note of Dürer’s famous rhinoceros, highlighted in a chapter on the master, in these pages of blog, but a pebble dropped into the mines of…
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When Drones Attack
At first it seems as if the raptor-versus-drone videos are a win for the birds. Rah, rah, nature over technology and all that. I’ve seen about half a dozen now, though, and don’t think it’s good for them at all. Which is why I won’t link to any here: publicity begets copycats, drone-heads eager for…
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No to TNR
A bill before New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proposes to fund TNR programs around the state. These are efforts to Trap, Neuter and vaccinate, and then Release feral cats back in the places they were found. Feral cats are our number one invasive species. They kill enormous numbers of birds and mammals every year and…
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Man Ray’s Sea Horse
After enjoying immensely the Sargent exhibit at the Met, I ran into this Man Ray gelatin silver print of 1930, “Histoire naturelle.” The text panel describes it as a petrified sea horse, at rather larger-than-life scale, supposedly as part of a Surrealist effort to defamiliarize ordinary objects. Simpler times.
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A Better Way To Plant
This patch of native meadow in Green-Wood Cemetery was a revelation on a recent afternoon when it was absolutely pulsing with life as numerous species of butterflies, dragonflies, bees, wasps, and beetles gathered pollen and nectar and munched on plants and each other. I gather it’s an experiment. I hope it thrives, and that those…
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NYC Is Wild?
I’ll say! Here’s typical American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) habitat in the city. That rectangular gap in the bracket is the entrance to a nest from which at least two youngsters fledged this year. North America’s smallest falcon species has really taken to such rotting cornices here in NYC: I know of three nests within a…
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Representations
The owl of Minerva overlooking wee Jamie Boswell’s brilliant career. National Portrait Gallery of Scotland.At the kirk in Duddingston, Edinburgh.On the exterior of The Salmon, in Belford. Presumably an earlier incarnation of the inn….In Craster, under the pall of the smokehouse working on the town’s famous kippers (cf. Salmon Rushdie’s first brush with the things).In…
Backyard and Beyond 