Spring is Busting Out All O-o-o-o-ver!
I was working on a post this morning (It begins: "I may be an idiot for bringing this up, but I can’t help myself . . ."), and then a dental adventure took up too much time and energy, so I'll post it next week. Promise. So, it's all about spring and the farm today. And, yes, lordy, lordy, spring is busting out all o-o-o-ver. Recent rains and warm weather have electrified the grass, neighborhoods are alive with pink, red, and white crab apples and redbuds, rabbits are rabbiting all over our yard, and the birds . . .? The birds are something else altogether. It’s like watching adolescents grow up if you could compress ten years into six weeks. It all started with the avian equivalent of Read More
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Sniffing Out Scent Dog Training
Well, how fun was that? Last weekend I was at the "Im-PECK-able Training Seminar" put on by Craig Schultz and Sally Dickinson for the K9 Behavior Consortium in Manassas, VA. I went primarily to learn more about sniffer dogs for my next mystery novel (wheeeee!), but reveled in spending time with some great dogs, and some way cool, interesting people. Along with Meryl Peeps. The chicken. Bonus: I got to spend time in person with kick-ass writer and dog handler, Cat Warren, of the NYT best selling book, What The Dog Knows. (You've read it, right?) Cat and I have spent the last 5 + years working together on our respective first forays into fiction, and I consider her a dear, close friend. Read More
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Watch Skip’s Run or! Practice Your Observation Skills on Dogs and SHEEP!
Skip ran in our first trial last weekend, and while watching the video to figure out how the heck he got a shed (the only really good one of the trial), I realized what a great opportunity it was to play the "Sharpen Our Observation Skills" game. I'll never forget my first day of Ethology Lab at UW-Madison, in which Professor Bayliss sat us down in front of a glass cage with rats in it and asked us to record our observations of their behavior. Afterward, our discussions went something like this: Prof: Describe what you saw, from second one to second ten. Us: One rat was asleep, the other walked to the side of the cage. Prof: But what was the posture of the sleeping rat? Read More
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