A short (but growing) list of recent essays:

• Not Just Ducks: A Conversation With Tom Quinn
  [Download Essay ]

I would like to put out these book proposals for the amusement of readers, and to show what my current projects are and where they stand. If any publishers ever read this, I am open to offers. And if anyone wants to send us to Kazakhstan for a month to finish the dog/domestication project ("In Search of Ancient Dogs"--not a real title--is the shorter book prop, "Unlikely Eden" the longest) it doesn't cost as much as you might think...."

• A FEATHERED TEMPEST [Download the PDF ]

  "The pigeon was a biological storm. He was the lightning that played between two opposing potentials of intolerable intensity: the fat of the land and the oxygen of the air. Yearly the feathered tempest roared up, down, and across the continent, sucking up the laden fruits of forest and prairie, burning them in a traveling blast of life. Like any other chain reaction, the pigeon could survive no diminuition of his own furious intensity. When the pigeoners subtracted from his numbers, and the pioneers chopped gaps in the continuity of his fuel, his flame guttered out with hardly a sputter or even a wisp of smoke."
       -Aldo Leopold, 1947

  Introduction

  "Slowly the passenger pigeons increased, then suddenly their numbers
  Became enormous, they would flatten ten miles of forest
  When they flew down to roost, and the cloud of their rising
  Eclipsed the dawn. They became too many, they are all dead.
  Not one remains."
       -Robinson Jeffers

  The passenger pigeon was not just a bird. Calling it a “biological storm,” as Aldo Leopold did, was an understatement; it was more like a series of simultaneous biological hurricanes, blowing all the time. At its population’s peak, four to five billion pigeons roared over the forests and prairies of the east and midwest, a number equal to the entire population of overwintering birds in the U.S.. A single flock in motion could darken the sky over 180 square miles. One recorded breeding colony in Wisconsin in 1871 was 125 miles long and between six and eight miles wide. Such a flock could consume two and ten million liters of food a day.

  The passenger pigeon is an icon, a symbol of the fertility of the pre-Columbian world and our ruining of Eden. We Europeans came to a world of abundance, cut down the trees, shot the pigeons, and hauled out barrels of salted pigeons in railroad cars to the markets of the east. By the 1870’s the birds were in retreat; in 1914, the last, cutely named “Martha” after George Washington’s wife, died in a zoo in Cincinnati. The pigeon’s extinction symbolizes the heedless exploitation of a continent’s riches at the hands of our culture.......[Complete Document ]

  Back to Top

• IN SEARCH OF ANCIENT DOGS [Download the PDF ]

  In June of 2002 I imported a puppy from the Ukraine. She was the first “tazi” ever to come to the States, and both the culmination and beginning of a story. Her breeder had brought her grandparents from Kazakhstan. They were from a remnant population, almost destroyed under Communist rule, of one of the oldest breeds on earth; possibly the oldest breed that is not a “wolf-type” like the husky. Although the Arabs claim that the saluki, often considered the oldest domesticated breed, originated with them, recent DNA and archaeological research indicates that dogs and horses were both domesticated in the shadows of the Altai range in Central Asia, where Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Siberia come together. The ancient breed there is the tazi, probably ancestor to such dogs as the saluki and the Afghan hound. Rock art in Central Asia that dates back to 3000 BC depicts dogs uncannily similar to the tazis of today.

  In Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Khyrghizstan, Afghanistan – nomads still use these “primitive” saluki-type dogs to hunt. Although Islam, which considers dogs unclean, is the predominant religion in these countries, salukis and their close relatives tazis are not only accepted but held in very high regard by the people, and are even allowed into their houses. To this day the dogs are used with falcons and eagles to hunt, and people go to great lengths to acquire the finest dogs. They were so valued by the often- rebellious tribal people that the Communists under Stalin made periodical attempts to exterminate them-- under the guise of game preservation, but actually to break the spirit and will of the tribes.

  Once we had “Lashyn”, named after a falcon that inhabits the deserts and mountains of Central Asia, she delighted us so much that I began trying to find a way to acquire a breeding stock of these dogs. I made contact with several of the official groups working to preserve them, as well as horses and falcons, as working breeds, My friend, Sir Terence Clark, a retired English saluki judge and diplomat who speaks excellent Russian, filmed some of the stock dogs in Kazakhstan for me; another friend, the Russian-American breeder and scientist Vladimir Beregovoy, provided “real-time” e-mail translations, as my basic Russian isn’t adequate for complicated conversations. In the fall of 2003 I traveled to Almaty, (formerly Alma- Ata)to meet the breeders. I brought back a female pup—no males were bred that season—and made plans to have a male sent to us to form a foundation stock for the breed in America. I will continue to use these dogs to hunt and work with their ago-old partners -- falcons, eagles, and horses........[Complete Document ]

  Back to Top

• PLEISTOCENE PARK [Download the PDF ]

  Why everything you know about pre-Columbian America is wrong: that “bison are a human artifact,” and so may be the Great Plains and the tundra; that the present Yellowstone megafauna are Eurasian; why we should (re)introduce elephants, horses, camels, and lions; why condors and certain plants may remain rare unless we do; what the Russians are doing about it...

  The cry “Revive the Pleistocene” is not new; I believe it was first said in a Michael McClure poem in 1975. But these days, as scientific knowledge of man’s impact on the megafauna and its associated ecosystem increases, it is looking like not only a romantic dream but a scientific possibility.

  Since the 70’s, a few visionary scientists have been arguing that the return of the ghosts would be both desirable and feasible. Most noteworthy among them – and cited by every writer and scientist I mention here – is Paul Martin, Emeritus Professor of Geosciences at the University of Arizona in Tucson and co-editor of the magisterial Quaternary Extinctions (1984.) He was a persuasive early advocate of the idea that horses and even elephants could restore plant (and therefore animal) biodiversity when reintroduced to the New World.

  And now somebody is trying to do the revival, but not (yet) in the USA.........[Complete Document ]

  Back to Top

• AN UNLIKELY EDEN: Animals, Humans, and Domestication in the Heart of Asia [Download the PDF ]

  I am going to list features of the content of each chapter in the “Victorian” manner, with dashes separating the topics or incidents, followed by explanations. Some chapters are already well-formed; others await more research.

  FOREWORD

  Where do obsessions begin? Sometimes their origin is in a forgotten memory, or maybe even in the genes.

  Writers may be lucky in this respect – everything in their lives is shaped into stories. I can pick up the two strands of the line that first tugged at me, then pulled me to the heart of Asia, exactly where and when they started.

  The first thread began in 1954, when I was a toddler already fascinated with tales and animals. My mother showed me a photo, in some lost magazine, that I never forgot: a dark man in a spotted fur coat and shaggy hat, seated on a horse, holding on his arm an immense black eagle with an eyeless cap on its head. The story of my life-long pursuit of that image is told in my last book, Eagle Dreams. Suffice it to say here that it led me to the Asia of my dreams.

  Turn back and begin another trail. In the seventies, a brilliant young editor and entrepreneur named Ed Gray got some money in hand and decided to launch America’s first literary and artistic hunting and fishing magazine: Gray’s Sporting Journal. I was already writing various nature pieces and book reviews for Boston’s “alternative” weekly papers, and jumped at the chance to get paid some real money for writing about things I loved.

  Ed tried to balance editorial content. Traditional tales of grouse, trout, and deer shared space with odder stuff, stranger than any stories ever published in a sporting magazine. One that drew equal amounts of praise and subscription cancellations was artist Russell Chatham’s “The Great Duck Misunderstanding”, a tale of gluttony, eros, and drunkenness that featured a naked woman with a parrot on her shoulder – the sporting hook was a dinner of wild ducks, harvested by the narrator the day before. Ed’s job was to encourage this kind of first-person journalism while running enough good old-fashioned material to keep the advertisers happy.

  So, sadly, some of the off-center material was returned with sincere regrets. Ed knew I had a soft spot for the strange ones, as well as an interest in ancient pursuits like falconry. One day he passed me a thick manuscript and a sheet of transparencies from one M.H. Salmon in darkest New Mexico, “Home with the Hounds.” I had never read anything like Salmon’s vivid portrait of swift dogs, Arabian salukis and rough-coated American “staghounds” that ran down coyotes and even swifter jackrabbits, as they had since at least the Bronze Age. It was like falconry on the ground. But we had run a lot of controversial material in the last few issues, and Ed thought coursing might be a bit primitive for our urbane readers. It went back, but not before I had written to Mr. Salmon. A new thread had begun........[Complete Document ]

  Back to Top