Saturday Morning Links

1. Ever heard of Sandwich Harbour? It’s in Namibia and this is the kind of place that looks amazing, but is probably also absolutely unforgiving.

Photo by Sergi Ferrete on Unsplash

2. This guy travels to countries and he doesn’t do a 20 minute video about an entire country, he does nearly an hour on a country and it’s pretty specific and informative. It’s also dubbed in English, so other than getting used to that, it’s great.

3. Would you like to see some fall colors of Yosemite Valley? California Fall Color has some beautiful pictures.

4. Alistair Humprheys bought a bit map near his home, divided it by 52 squares and explored each and every square for 52 weeks. This last post, Parakeets is the culmination of that project. Humprheys also wrote about the idea of adventure being a self-indulgent pursuit without value to society. This is something I think about but had never been able to internalize. Going and doing things was something that I love to do, but it also meant leaving my family and doing things that really no one else participated in because I’d go run for a few hours and the only one that this benefits is me. Regardless, these things still benefit me greatly, or at least I get a tremendous amount of benefit from doing these things. This is fun for me so from a societal standpoint, there may not be a huge benefit, but from a personal standpoint, yes it is benefit.

5. Absolutely terrific. Texas Monthly’s Wes Ferguson spends a day with the squirrel hawkers of East Texas.

Of  all the red-tailed hawks that have ever soared on a Texas breeze, only one gets to live in Charlie Alvis’s house, at least during the winter hunting season. “My bird has its own bedroom,” said Alvis, a falconer who’s based in the unincorporated community of Porter, just beyond the northern outskirts of Houston. “When I come home at night, that bird comes in the living room with me. We socialize for hours at a time.”

The 43-year-old Alvis, who’s temporarily living in Brownwood, in Central Texas, for work, is long and lean and sports a gray beard. His five-year-old hawk has a golden chest, dark wings, a fan of reddish tail feathers, and, often, a murderous glare in her eyes. Alvis acquired the bird from a falconer in Georgia more than two years ago. He named her Calypso but doesn’t use it. There’s no point, he told me. Hawks respond to whistles and bloody snacks, not noms de guerre.

Human and hawk share a certain understanding, though. Alvis can sense any change in the bird’s demeanor. “I can open the door to her room and tell if she’s ready to hunt,” he said—her normally fluffy feathers become slicked back like a solid suit of body armor. In such moments, she answers an unspoken question: Do you want to kill some squirrels? “You know I do,” the hawk seems to tell Alvis. “Where are we going?”