Not just for the birds

Category: Outdoors

Things that happen outside of buildings, usually away from “it all”

  • Angus of the Chukar Hills

    "Angus of the Chukar Hills" by Rachel Teannalach
    “Angus of the Chukar Hills” by Rachel Teannalach

    When the season consumes you, you don’t worry about much else. When it’s over, you worry about everything else. Filling up that worry with good things to carry it away like water helps. Yesterday was one of those good days between seasons. We collected a painting we commissioned and hung it up. It is working already.

    We’d admired Rachel Teannalach‘s work for quite a while. Her eye for light and spirit in landscapes resonated with us. We lucked into taking her for a hike into one of our favorite spots, and she got to work, after we subjected her to what seemed like thousands of “favorite” photos of Angus in Hell’s Canyon.

    Not being a painter, I’d never studied her work closely, but having this on our wall now gives me the chance to see, maybe, what good painters see and translate through and onto their media and make into spirit and feeling.

    Detail: Brownlee Reservoir
    Detail: Brownlee Reservoir
    Detail: Angus pointing
    Detail: Angus pointing

    Only connect. Yesterday my teacher Bruce Gandy won a major bagpipe competition. A year or so ago, after watching a video I’d made about connecting things (one of which was chukar hunting with Angus), he thought he’d found the subject title to one of his piobaireachd compositions. “Salute to Angus of the Chukar Hills” was title he settled on. Having two works of art in sight and sound is good. What’s best for me is the connection between people and animals and landscapes and sounds that make me feel connected.

    Yesterday, we picked a puppy brother for Angus. Peat’ll be ready to come home in a few weeks (more on that later). We also went to a track meet and watched some of my students run well. Bruce won a major competition. We got a gorgeous painting. Ripples in water, crossing each other, making me smile inside, washing away worry.

  • Not just for the birds

    Not just for the birds

    It’s not at all “just” for the birds. It’s not “just” for any one thing.

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    It’s for Angus, whose rapturous pursuit of birds expresses the epitome of equivocal desire: his instincts draw him toward birds, but he knows I’m also interested and – because he checks on where I am, even when he’s birdy – wants to involve me in his game.

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    It’s for Leslie, who does not hunt and does not kill but is drawn by her awe of Angus’ abilities (athletic, olfactory, instinctual) and her love of connecting with landscapes unavailable any other way, despite her abhorrence of watching birds getting murdered.

    The easy part

    It’s for the getting-lostness of it, for the forgettingness of it, and what I get from that mental negative space in spectacularly positive physical space.

    It’s for putting meat in the freezer.

    It’s for what’s possible.

    It’s for dealing with unmet expectations.

    It’s for beauty.

    It’s for practicing grace in an imperfect world.

    And it’s for a lot of other stuff, good, bad, and unknown. It keeps us all going.

    We wish you peace, luck, and joy, and not just for 2015.

    Enjoy the video…

  • Landscapes

    I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. 
    -Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)

    http://www.farnsworthmuseum.org/sites/default/files/imce/collections/Turkey%20Pond.jpg
    Andrew Wyeth, Turkey Pond, 1944, tempera on panel.

    Some of Leslie’s chukar hunting landscape photos from this fall and winter…

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    Have a wonderful holiday. Peace on Earth.

  • A difficulty of chukar

    The Chukar
    Alectoris chukar: a difficult bird, to say the least

    A comment I just responded to made me think of the interesting collective nouns for groups of creatures: a murder of crows, a school of fish, a congregation of alligators, a shrewdness of apes, a memory of elephants, a superfluity of nuns (?), a pride of lions…  Chukar need a collective noun. I think they’re feeling neglected, which might account for their behavior. I know some refer to them as “devil birds,” but calling them “a devil of chukar” doesn’t work for me because there is only one devil, and his name is Vanilla Ice.

    I’m thinking of something close to the collective noun for ravens, an “unkindness,” but a bit stronger. “Pain in the ass” is, I think, too long. “Jihad” might work, but I’d rather it be an English word, although given the native lands of chukar might it be appropriate?

    An expletive might do the trick, for I’m fairly sure every chukar hunter has uttered a string of such one or a thousand times during a hunt: a “f*&king of chukar”?

    Perhaps naming them after a reviled but nonetheless admirable person? How does an “O. J.” or a “Cheney” or a “Kaczynski” of chukar sound?

    Or maybe naming them after a method of torture might be best. A castration of chukar? A tasering or a waterboarding of chukar? Or maybe just something much broader in scope, which could encompass the entire endeavor of chukar hunting and the prey themselves: a “difficulty of chukar.”

    What would you call them?

  • The time is nigh

    chukarhunting-net
    The Chukarhunting.net Sea Runner is ready

    Getting close. We’ve taken to sitting in the boat in the evenings now, imagining, strategizing, speculating, expectorating, and imbibing IPA.

    Chukar have serenaded us during every fishing trip this summer. Angus has filed away their crowing coordinates.

    We took a hike last weekend through a favorite late-season spot (which is the same place we took photos for an earlier post), which is bone dry now – I just wanted to walk and get Angus some hill work, and didn’t expect to see any birds or sign. I didn’t. There’s nothing for partridges to eat there yet. I did notice a plant (see photo below) that looks like cocklebur spread everywhere the cattle have been, but as far as I can tell it’s not cocklebur.

    What's this plant?
    What’s this plant?

    Anyone have any ideas on what it is? I’d never noticed this plant here before; if it is a cocklebur, we’ll avoid that area in the fall because Angus has a real talent for collecting them, which adds an unpleasant hour or two to every post-hunt ritual.

    Finally, I bought a new domain for this blog (decaled on the boat: chukarhunting.net). It shouldn’t affect how you get here, or anything else. Just shorter.

    Hang in there, I tell Angus and Leslie. It’s almost time. But I’m really talking to myself. It happens a lot this time of year.