Monday, 27 September 2010
I am home again – hurray!! And the dogs were very pleased to see me as was Mozart, although he can’t see much, but can hear me, and even my Goshawk was sort of pleased, and I think the staff too!! The trip was fine although the last bit before I left was a little more annoying than planned.I let the dogs out last thing, which was a little earlier than usual as I wanted to get to bed early for getting up early (and why is that if you have to get up at 4.30am or there abouts you spend the whole night, what there is of it, waking up and checking the alarm to see if you have missed it ggggggrrrrrrrrr!). All the dogs came back except for Acer, so I called and yelled and swore and whatnot, only to hear the thumping of a tail underneath the decking outside the French windows in the drawing room. Yup she was underneath and stuck! I tried pulling her out with her tail, that was not going to work, I tried encouragement, that was definitely not going to work, I went to see if Adam was in to come and help, that did not work either. So I grabbed a spade and a torch and started digging, as I did she crawled to the back facing away from me – great. I could not reach her, so a second hole was dug to allow me to get further under and I finally got one finger round one back leg
and managed to pull her enough to get both and then haul her out!! And finally get to bed to not sleep.All planes behaved themselves and I managed to get an earlier flight into Denver from New York, so got to the hotel in reasonable time and went out to supper with lots of old friends. The sad thing about raptor conferences today and I suspect many others as well is that in the old days I would go to as many papers as I could and be able to take good, relevant, interesting facts and information about various birds of prey home, tell my staff and refresh our commentaries. Now its all DNA, and computer models and millions of graphs and I understand very little of it and much does not seem to even be about the birds. Although I was pleased to hear one of my old science friends state that he had no idea about most of it either so I did not feel so badly about it. But it certainly does limit the number of papers that I want to go to these days. Which was why I was happy to skive off for one full afternoon and go with Arthur Middleton to Laramie, where he is at University doing his PhD on Wolves and Elk, it was great to see him and even greater to see Lily, Aster and Arabis’s sister, who despite having a recent stroke, was looking wonderful.
The paper went well and I had extra time which was wonderful, although
as usual when we have an education session, all the educationalists come and few of the scientists, which is a shame, as they might learn something! The trip back went smoothly with very little time between flights, although I did have to go to Frankfurt to get back in time. And I got back to grey, fine mist, rain and cloud – it was wonderful!Holly and I flew Dusky Emperor last thing and we are going to try her loose tomorrow, we are also going to start work on the Griffon Vulture and see if we can get him to fly out and back into his aviary, should be interesting.
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