news from Ashgabat

Nice picture by C.J. Chivers of supreme Turkmens past and present in a new International Herald Tribune story. I am especially fond of the hi-volume, helmet haircut seemingly required of all autocrats.

The actual article by Chivers is a little strange -- and while it might be said that it's merely a reflection of Turkmenistan -- there seems to be an assumption that somehow the US occupies some kind of moral high ground as if spreading democracy has it's own value... and getting access to massive natural resources is merely a cool side-effect. Could just be little cynical me, of course.

And maybe Berdykmukhammedov has seen a bunch of Scorsese films, or maybe C.J. Chivers deserves the credit for writing his story like one. But this brought a smile to my face: 'In April, he [Berdykmukhammedov] fired the country's senior law enforcement officer on national television. "I have a whole file with evidence against you," he said. "I could dishonor you like a dog."'

All I have to say is: "My Vizsla is smarter than your government official."

reader feedback

Our friend Emily said she'd read the Regal Vizsla to-date and loved it, but there was too much dog and not enough ballet. I have no idea what this means, but in an effort to accomodate Emily, here's a few words from Donald McCaig's Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men:

"Any athlete, dog or man, must master the flowing gestalt of things, must comprehend physical meaning, must be slightly ahead of the action. Amateurs think of a sheepdog trial as static geometry: a pattern of invisible straight lines the sheep must traverse. That's mistaking the choreography for the ballet." (p.51)

Charles Fergus uses the phrase "this state of excited equilibrium" (p. 16) to describe a similar kind of synchronicity and anticipation when it comes to hunters, gamebirds, and bird-dogs. For him, that balletic balance is 'the upland equation.'

There will be no pictures of Vizslas in tutus. But I hope this makes you even happier, Emily.

semantics: chicks or poults?

So, at work today, Ed asked me if young grouse were really called 'poults' or if that was just baby pheasants and turkeys? Good question.

I think the short answer is that it's not technically, ie. lexicologically, wrong to call them poults, but recent convention has been to call young grouse chicks instead.

For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines poults as: "The young of the domestic fowl, a chicken; also of the turkey, pheasant, guinea-fowl, and various game birds." The second cited usage of poult from c.1440 is given as: "Pulte, yonge hen, gallinella"; the 1863 citation specifically mentions "Ptarmigan poults, hardly fledged." Ptarmigan, like grouse, belong to the order Galliformes. It could be assumed, therefore, that calling young grouse 'poults' is not out of spirit with the early use of the word.

However, few of the relatively modern sporting writers use anything other than 'chicks' to describe young grouse. I just looked in my books by Norris, Knight, Woolner, and Furtman... none of them use poult. I don't have time to scan all my George Bird Evans books and don't (yet) have a copy of Gardiner Bump's magnum opus on the life-cycle of grouse. But I'm feeling pretty good about correcting myself.

I'm posting the bibliography here because half of the books haven't been reprinted:

a) Charles Norris, Eastern Upland Shooting, with Special Reference to Bird Dogs and their Handling, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1946;
b) John Alden Knight, Ruffed Grouse, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947;
c) Frank Woolner, Grouse and Grouse Hunting, New York: Crown, 1970;
d) Michael Furtman, Ruffed Grouse: Woodland Drummer, Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1999.

so much excitement...

So much has been going on in the last few days...

We went over to a friend of Meg's house in Queens on Saturday for a little BBQ with friends and family... and to celebrate their dog's 14th birthday! Happy Birthday, Pandora! Seeing as Pandora is a little advanced in age, Momo decided to get rambunctious with their neighbour's dog, Lucy... for pretty much the entire time. To be fair, Lucy was the prime instigator.

Then on Sunday afternoon, Momo and I went for a little roadtrip back up to our favorite gamebird farm in western MA. After a luxurious night at the Motel 6 in Brattleboro, we got there nice and early. What a nice day! Compared to the last time we were there when the temperature hardly changed all morning and the breeze was virtually non-existent, it warmed up a nice 15degsF while we were there, the humidity only dropped slightly, and the breeze was fairly constant. What a difference for Momo's sniffer. There was a lot more ground cover than the last time which helped to keep the chukar feel hidden so there was a lot less running on their part. While he still had his moments of clumsiness and bumped four birds, Momo threw some nice shapes to show me birds on the ground. All in all, we claimed seven birds, he bumped four, and I missed two.

One of the highlights wasn't the chukar he found, but the turkey(!) and more excitingly, the ruffed grouse hen and six poults. Now maybe they've been juicing up the grouse in the Connecticut River Valley, but that hen bird was huge compared to the midgets we've found in Sterling Forest in NY. Anyways, hopefully that's a good sign for coming years and that after several low years, the grouse population is on the rebound.

Momo was certainly tired -- and slept pretty much all the way home. Now we're going to watch the Academy Award-nominated Mongolian film Cave of the Yellow Dog.

serendipidity...

No, this beautiful dog, Old Hemlock Rangeley, isn't our crazy little Vizsla-pants -- but he is an Old Hemlock dog. Currently I am reading Catherine Harper's 1998 biography of George Bird Evans -- and due to a couple of minor coinicidences, decided to a) post a picture of a dog descended from his particular strain of DeCoverly setters, and b) write a few words.

The coincidences are simple: I had no idea George (and later his wife, Kay, who passed away just a couple of months ago) had lived in NYC as a younger man. His first apartment is less than two blocks from where I work on the Upper East Side; once he and Kay had married, they first lived on E. 11th St... which was less than a block from the Dean & Deluca that I was having a morning coffee at today.

Unlike numerous other outdoor writers, George wrote prolifically AND wrote beautifully throughout his life. I am lucky to own a couple of George's books -- both of them signed, but more importantly, both inscribed. Even in something as relatively disposable as an aphorism to go with one's autograph, George was able to capture the essence of the relationship between a dog, a human, a gun, and a bird. I have a copy of Troubles with Bird Dogs (1975) inscribed as follows: "Each of us seeks his paradise; the lucky ones find it with a dog and a gun."

The city is hot. And despite the new air-conditioning units in our house, the heat makes me think of cooler weather, the russets and golds of fall, and the sound of wings beating retreat.

OOOOOH: Happy Birthday, Mum!!

WWTBD? part 2...

What would Turkmenbashi do? Slap himself in the forehead for not thinking of this first.

Mrs. Aksoltan Ataeva, Turkmenistan's Ambassador to the U.N., said: "Ashgabat wasn't built in one day. We can't expect the United States to become a post-Soviet autocracy riddled with croneyism, insider dealings, and a flagrant disrespect for basic rules of law overnight. We are proceeding under the assumption that there are possibilities for U.S.-Turkmen relations that simply did not exist a few months ago."'

She also remarked off-camera that Evan Feigenbaum was clearly too smart for his own good. And that she wished the Supreme Turkmen had thought of electing his own supra-legal Attorney General while he was still alive.

WWTBD?

What would Turkmenbashi do? Roll over in his grave.

From the International Herald Tribune: "The president (Turkmenbashi's succesor, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov), for his part, has hinted at change, including allowing a small number of public Internet connections in the capital and calling for improvements in the country's hobbled educational system." The next thing you know there'll be gold teeth and disco music back on the streets of Ashgabat. Wonder if you still have to recite the (dead) Supreme Turkmen's poetry to get a driver's license?

The article contains one of the sanest quotes from the State Department I've read ever: '"Rome wasn't built in a day, and we don't expect that Turkmenistan is going to turn into a Jeffersonian democracy by next Thursday," Evan Feigenbaum, deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, said in an interview by telephone before Fallon's delegation arrived. "We are proceeding under the assumption that there are possibilities for U.S.-Turkmen relations that simply did not exist a few months ago."' (With logic like that Mr. Feigenbaum is probably going to be fired shortly for 'performance reasons.')

As for Kazakhstan: it's one thing to have yourself declared Supreme Turkmen for ever (that probably automatically elevates itself into a realm of 'crackpot')... and thankfully Team Astana have their act together. Nevertheless, politics in the capital Astana is reading like an episode of Days of Our Lives... divorces by fax, alleged coup attempts, kidnapping...