PEACHFRONT SPEAKS

Recent entries july 4, 2018 - 2018-07-04 the triangle continues of courtney, boobear, & nyota - 2018-07-03 Cookie so cute telling, "Hello" to sparrows - 2018-07-01 lovebirb in love - 2018-06-30 wren with fluffffff - 2018-06-24 Read my new book, The 10 Best Things You Can Do For Your Bird at Amazon or at many other fine distributors like Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobo, and more. By public demand, and after a delay of an embarrassing number of years, I've finally put my notorious essay, Ender and Hitler: Sympathy for the Superman, free on the fabulous internets. A bibliography of my published books and stories. Here's a simple card-counting FAQ to get you up to speed on the basics. Here's the true story of the notorious DD' blackjack team, told for the first time on the fabulous internets. No other team went from a starting investor's bankroll of zero to winning millions of dollars. A Sadean take on Asimov's classic Three Laws of Robotics can be found in Roger Williams' NOW REVIEWED ON SLASHDOT!!! The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. Adult readers only please -- explicit sex and violence. For updates on the "Dead Tree Project" and other topics, you may visit the official fan site, Passages in the Void.. My Bird Lists -- My Louisiana State Life List, My Yard List and, tah dah, My World Life List. HEY! What happened to the Peachfront Conure Files? The world's only OFFICIAL Peachfront Conure site now features free peachfront conure coverage, including a magazine length Intro to Conures previously published in American Cage-Bird Magazine, now free on the web. I offer the best free Peachfront Conure information on the internet. If you have great Peachfront Conure info, stories, or photos to share, contact me so I can publicize your pet, your breeding success, your great photograph, etc. on my site. Thanks.

"i made up my mind," he said. "i'm cancelling the rest of my life to do this." 2011-01-07 - 11:02 a.m. It's easy for me to write movie reviews, because I see so few movies. Ditto for TV shows. Books...well...I read a great many books and if I wrote them up, I'd already be backlogged for the next 900 years. So I usually don't, even though I'm pretty sure that when I first thought of keeping this diary, I imagined myself as this retired blackjack player living a quiet life of contemplation and all that high holy crap, and I'd be able to write up at least the best of the books I've read. Ha. You could be Infinite Jest itself and you won't get a mention. Reading is like breathing, and who writes about breathing. So it is that this entry isn't about a book. It's about, I suppose, my reaction to a book. But it's really about how you lose faith. So here we go... I finally got around to reading The Grail Bird by Tim Gallagher. Yeah, well, I had other priorities in 2005, the year of its publication. It's a rip-roaring tale, no doubt about it. The cool thing about Gallagher is that he knows how to spin a yarn, and he never met a digression he didn't like, and c'mon, we all know that Peachfront is all about the digression. Entire chapters are devoted to the life stories of the ivory-bill chasers. Jim Tanner's story for instance. Gallagher interviews his surviving wife, Nancy, who notes shrewdly that at her advanced age no one would waste a moment on her if she wasn't the widow of Jim Tanner. She too has seen the Ivory-Billed, one of the few who can put it on her life list without discussion, because as a young woman she was canny enough to get out of her sleeping bag and into the forest when he knocked. And there's this whole long convoluted story about how they met and how he avoided being eaten by sharks in World War 2 and on and on and so forth. He gets included as a grad student on the team to photograph some of the few remaining ivory-bills and that's it, that's his doctorate thesis. "He was only twenty or twenty-one when it started," says his wife, and that's his fate, all decided. Studying the birds, losing the birds, forever searching to regain the birds. He couldn't save the Singer Tract, and apparently FDR himself couldn't save it either. (The wanton looting of the South by the North, all these years after the Civil War had ended -- the cutting to the last tree of value -- makes a chilling read indeed.) In defiance of all reason or decency, the loggers cut faster, vindictively, to kill the birds and to take the last of the ancient giant trees, even though Louisiana's governor had already offered to buy the site at a handsome price. So, to no one's benefit, not even their own, they destroy the land anyway, to prove some hateful point. And poor Jim Tanner, who went back one time to Greenlea Bend ("the gem" of the old growth forest at Singer) and saw it reduced to soybean fields and never went back, who developed a brain tumor and ended up paralyzed "for months" until he thank God finally died...is this a parable? A parable about what? If fate saves you from the sharks that devoured 700 men on the U.S Indianapolis, don't you expect something more from fate than the slow downhill dribble toward doom? But Tanner never lost the faith. He was searching until the end, always willing to take a phone call from someone who thought they saw an Ivory-Bill. And there were a decent number of folks who thought they saw an Ivory-Bill, even a man who snapped a couple of photos in 1971. And here's where the UFO stuff comes in. Of course, the Ivory-Bill is a protected species, and anyway who would have the heart to shoot one? But think about all the photo and video of UFOs down through the decades, some of these sightings confirmed by tens of thousands or even, supposedly, up to a million people during a wave in Mexico City. Our mentor, if you will, in the New Age/crystal hunting business in the late 1980s, was a man from Arkansas who had once worked on a UFO hunting team with J. Allen Hynek. So in those days, we'd over and over again meet people who have seen UFOs, and most of them are of course perfectly sincere. There is no financial advantage to having seen a UFO. In fact, I can't think of any advantage of any kind that someone ever got from an encounter. They have no reason to fabricate any of this. I didn't meet Strieber, but since everyone knows who he is, perhaps he's a good example of what I'm talking about. I can't see how the money Strieber earned from his UFO encounter books, which completely destroyed his credibility as a serious writer and make him seem like a sad, pathetic person, could possibly make up for the money and respect he lost doing more "important" books like War Day. He harmed himself and he convinced no one else. So it is with the Ivory-Bill hunters, even the serious guys like John Dennis. Even with the man who snapped the 1971 photographs. I mean, the bird is right there, in living color, way up in the forest canopy, and the detractors are coming up with some bizarre theory about how the photos might have been faked. Really? How? Why? He isn't leading a tour group. He isn't a park official trying to get funds. He's just a guy who (cleverly) remains anonymous and lets George Lowery take the flack for presenting the photographs. I guess Lowery could have gotten hold of a stuffed Ivory-Bill to fake the photo with, but c'mon. Why would he? This is the Deep South. If someone doesn't like you, they just shoot you or bad-mouth you behind your back; they don't indulge in some long drawn-out elaborate prank. A lot of people see UFOS, they photograph UFOs, they videotape UFOs, but somehow no one ever finds a scrap of a UFO. (The Roswell crash item was an ASH CAN atmosphere sampling balloon, and you can see one for yourself at the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, New Mexico.) And it is becoming apparent that people see Ivory-Bills, they photograph them, they videotape them, but somehow the photos and the videos aren't good enough without "processing" and somehow no one ever picks up a feather. And I suppose if they did pick up a feather, the detractors would back up and try to claim that it came from a stuffed bird anyway. I have to admit, when the re-discovery was first announced, I never doubted for a moment, even though I thought the video in question astoundingly awful and unconvincing; there is no chance of a hoax from this crowd, and the people who have seen the bird are for the most part absolutely believable, with everything to lose if caught getting involved in a fraud. But then...it's Wednesday, November 12, 2008 I'm standing on a mountainside in Costa Rica, and we hear the double-knock, and my guide gets out the scope and we look at the bird. A lovely bird. A perfect specimen of the Pale-Billed Woodpecker. And the trouble is, the distance it is, you could hear double-knock ringing out for miles. No special acoustic recording tape hidden deep in a tree in a swamp. No special processing to bring out a faint little cry. It was LOUD. Damn LOUD. So maybe it's the acoustics in the mountains, maybe it's a lot of things. But the truth is, I saw how far away that bird was and how clearly I could hear it, and I no longer believed. If the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker still exists, I would have heard it a hundred times without trying. Everybody in Louisiana would have. So, yeah, lately I've heard the theory that the surviving Ivory-Bills are using their indoor voices to conceal themselves from the loggers or the hunters or the whoevers. Under this hypothesis, the Ivory-Bills that survived are some race or subspecies that double-knocks very, very quietly. Is that believable to you? We have a very large bird, substantially larger than a Pileated Woodpecker, but it's just tippy-tapping away as quietly as can be? C'mon now. I'm going to need some evidence of that. But my theory is just as wacky, maybe even more wacky. It seems to me that there are "ghosts" for lack of a better word that people sometimes see. By "ghosts" I don't mean that we're being haunted by the souls of dead woodpeckers or the souls of dead Space Brothers either. I don't mean that the "ghosts" ever had a physical existence at all. I just don't know a better word. "Entities," maybe. Or maybe it's something about the human mind that allows us, sometimes, to see and even photograph these entities, but then they fade away again like fairy gold. I mean, let's face it. When the Madagascar Serpent-Eagle was rediscovered, it wasn't long before someone went to a nest, trapped a bird, banded a bird, and photographed the bird before releasing her. It wasn't long before L. could train folks to look out for other nests and to, repeatedly, find them and track/band those nestlings as well. And that's in rural, primitive Madagascar. The bird went from being "extinct" for 60 years to L. leading a tour group right to the nest, with Peachfront among the onlookers. And that is a difficult forest species that disappears into its nest high in the canopy like you wouldn't believe. The trouble with the Ivory-Bill is that people keep finding "nests" but there's never an Ivory-Bill in the nest. It has always, for some reason, most mysteriously, just departed and then decides to never come back while anybody's looking. The very definition of fairy gold. So I lost my faith. I no longer believe that the Ivory-Bill Woodpecker exists as a physical, living, breathing bird species. The evidence we have for UFOs is better than the evidence we have for the survival of the Ivory-Bill Woodpecker and even if we sort of believe in UFOs, we sort of don't. Sadly, I think the Ivory-Bill Woodpecker is still extinct. Lord, I hope I'm wrong. back - next All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2002-2017 by Elaine Radford