Dear Lloyd,
Your blog is one of my very favorites, inspirational and informational. I won’t even go into the fact that I still have my original copy of SHELTER, purchased in 1975 at a bookstore in Cleveland, Ohio.
I thought you might enjoy these photos of a bobcat I surprised on an early morning hike at Sonoma Mountain outside Petaluma. He/She was hunting gophers when I came along (luckily with a telephoto lens!). I went to post these on Instagram and was dismayed to find that the bobcat hashtag was overrun with photos of hunters proudly holding up their beautiful dead bobcats (one hunter even referred to his kill as “nigga”). Sad, to me, anyway.
So, please enjoy!
Sincerely,
Stefan (Gutermuth)
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
Dear Lloyd,
It's a beauty. Thanks Stefan for sharing with Lloyd's readers.
After reading the headline, my first thought was, "Wow, those are badass gophers!"
To Stefan via Lloyd—
Wonderful photos, Stefan. I shudder to think of the hunter who referred to his kill as "nigga" — that is worse than horrible. Brrrr.
I love your photos of the bobcat hunting gophers, bounding across the field so freely, and seeming to smile proudly at the camera from the mouth of the gopher hole.
Our dog would probably look like this during gopher season if we let her off-leash. As it is, she'll stick her entire head down into a hole if my husband walks anywhere near one. He once phoned me to come to a field to help him get the dog out. "She can't breathe down there," he insisted. I tried to tell him she'd come up for air rather than suffocate, but he didn't believe me.
Kay, Alberta, Canada
I suspect that the local Lynx is the reason I keep finding the severed heads of various ground-dwelling rodents in my yard. While I appreciate the extermination efforts, I hope that the cat leaves my miniature horse alone.
The rumor around the neighborhood is that one of the residents here drilled the cougar that was hanging around after it was seen stalking a woman who was bending down tending her garden. Can't say I'm too disappointed to hear this, I saw that cat in my front yard last summer, not 10 feet from the house. I was standing in be back yard at the time, and let me tell you, it looked BIG!