Listening to crows

 American crows caw year-round in our neighborhood. I’ve been trying to distinguish one call from another. One that’s easy to identify is the begging call made by juveniles.

I started hearing the youngsters in May. Some were still in the nest and are clamoring for food. Some were on the ground but couldn’t fly yet and called on the adults for help.

The begging call sounds more like a “wah” than a “caw.” If you don’t know it, there are links to recordings below.

Some of the fledglings will go off on their own, while others will stick around and help their parents. Biologists talk about “helpers,” adult birds that help the breeding pair.

Crows eat just about anything, and there’s a lot of calling among the adults. When someone discovers a bonanza, everyone in the family is called in, while members of other families are warned off.

Research suggests some gender roles among the helpers. Females tend to act as sentinels, allowing the other adults to forage. Males tend to act as enforcers, driving off crows from other families and joining in mobbing predators.

One call is unmistakable: the scream.

On a trip to Walker’s Pond, we saw six crows mobbing a red-tailed hawk. I think the hawk had discovered a young crow on the ground and had hoped for lunch. It left disappointed.

• Sources: Recordings of juvenile crows begging are here:
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hs=MtVV&sca_esv=05ee508a17931f71&hl=en-us&q=Begging+call+juvenile+crow+youtube&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiY_ICkqLKVAxWP4ckDHb7gDzQQ1QJ6BAhXEAE&biw=312&bih=516&dpr=3#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:1f9f8c5a,vid:JtrVloeFzFQ,st:0
and here:

https://youtu.be/OnBD9As92fE?is=gvj6sroDK0m29nRQ

Dr. Robin Tarter’s master’s thesis, “The Vocal Behavior of the American Crow, Corvus Brachyrhynchos”; The Ohio State University, 2008, is available here:

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=osu1204876597&disposition=inline

‘250 to 250’

 Historian Heather Cox Richardson is producing a series of 250 one-minute videos to mark the country’s 250^thanniversary. Each is about a person, place or event that is part of our collective story. It’s a reminder that all kinds of people make history.

I’m interested in the series as whole because I’m a fan of Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy, which seeks to tell the story of the Americas in a series of vignettes. 

I love stories told in this way. The first and hardest trick, it seems to me, is to decide which short stories to tell.

If I were telling the story, I’d include the Lead Plate Expedition led by Capt. Pierre-Joseph Céleron de Blainville in 1749. The French and English were quarreling over much of the continent, and the expedition went down the Ohio River, putting lead plates at the major tributaries, claiming the watershed for Louis XV. 

I like the story because it’s barmy, baffling and tragic at the same time. We — meaning the people who belong to this place — have understood so little what a watershed means that it’s hard to grasp. We’ve made great claims about ownership and rights while understanding little about the land and its natural history. We’ve done great damage and are still at it, pausing only occasionally to look around and think.

I think that’s part of our story.

• Sources: The introduction to the “250 to 250” project is here:

https://youtu.be/xrzQjU560Gs?is=_JGPDtwvNDp_nxWv

Some episodes are better than others. I belatedly tuned in to the series when I read Michael Leddy’s criticism of the episode on Willa Cather. His post “Willa Cather in 250 to 250” is here:

https://mleddy.blogspot.com/2026/06/willa-cather-in-250-to-250.html

A note on notes, marks and boundaries

 Liddell & Scott say that the ancient Greek verb τεκμαίρομαι means “to fix by a mark or boundary, to ordain, decree … “

You could argue that the idea began with this notion: The gods tried to educate humans by marking boundaries. But marks and markers aren’t really marks unless they are recognized as such by others — a mark has to mean something to someone else.

The Greeks loved stories about some hapless man failing to recognize a divine boundary. They also noted the importance of being able to perceive something as a mark or sign and to make inferences, conclusions and judgments.

By Epicurus’s time, the idea had shifted a bit further. He said that our senses — not the gods — are the boundary markers we should use in making inferences.

I got stopped by a passage in Diogenes Laertius for a couple of reasons.

First, if you have read British philosophers of the last century, you might have been led to believe that British thinkers invented empiricism. 

Second, I’m interested in what a note is — what it means to mark something in a way that others can notice it too. If you can mark something in this way, you can return to it, perhaps remark on it. You can find your place again. The idea that you’re observing some kind of boundary when you’re doing this is interesting.

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II, p. 568.

On gripeweed, with awe

 One of the wonders of keeping a garden in the Georgia Piedmont is Phyllanthus urinaria, a plant so adapted to this place you’d think it has been here forever. But it’s a newcomer from Asia.

The first record of P. urinaria in North America was at a nursery in Texas in 1944. It went across the Southeast to Virginia in a flash. To my eye, it’s as settled as kudzu.

Most of the literature I’ve seen on this plant comes from scientists who study weeds at agricultural colleges. The papers are a chorus of alarmed voices. Of the plant’s many common names, I like “gripeweed.”

Gripeweed is small, topping out at 2 feet. Its leaves might remind you of mimosa, and “mimosa weed” might be this plant’s most common name. The flowers grow directly on the stem.

The griping about gripeweed is about how prolific it is. It can go from seed to flower in two weeks. Each plant can produce thousands of seeds. The fruits are exploders — as they ripen, the chemistry within the fruit builds up enough force to scatter the seeds like shrapnel.

A garden bed I cleaned two weeks ago is covered. You’d have to be a much more conscientious weeder than I am to control gripeweed.

As a gardener, I’m dismayed. As a naturalist, I’m impressed.

That place

 Scott Russell Sanders writes about place, including that place. It’s the place you go to in the middle of the night, sleepless because you are not only lost but you have lost your bearings, your way of determining direction. 

Surely the place you know I am talking about. You have skidded down the slope toward oblivion, for shorter or longer stays. And so you realize the pit is not a gap in something solid, like a hole in rock, but the absence of all solidity, the square root of nowhere and nothing. I go there too often, never willingly, usually dragged from bed by the scruff of my neck.

 

I came to Sanders’s essays because I’m interested in natural places, but I recognized the place he’s talking about. Sanders says we think of some places as shelters. We turn some shelters into sanctuaries, but even the sanctuary of a home won’t protect us from fear.

Sanders is describing the fear of oblivion. It strikes me as a remarkable description of depression.

• Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 40.

The great American poet

 A note about the canon of great literature reminds me that there’s an interesting symposium in Plough magazine on “Who is America’s Homer?” The subhead frames the question: 

If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who do we have? Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity?

 

People made cases for names you’d expect (Whitman and Frost) and for some you might not (Tracy Chapman). I was pleased that William Carlos Williams came up.

But it seemed to me that the best arguments were made by those who said America doesn’t have a Homer. 

Christian Wiman, a poet I admire, mentioned a more recent set of poets that included Heaney of Ireland, Milosz of Poland and Akhmatova of Russia. As Wiman put it, “all of these writers speak from and to a coherent culture.”

The notion that American culture could be coherent was intriguing.

• Source: “Who is America’s Homer?”; Plough, June 24, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.plough.com/articles/who-is-americas-homer

A recipe for carp bait

 The commonplace on The Compleat Angler is that everyone knows about it, but nobody has read it.

I took my time getting to it. I read an excerpt in college. I read it cover to cover at 70.

It’s a strange and wonderful book, especially for someone like me — a person who is interested in the sense of place and who is prone to say that wild places, natural places, are better than the places you find in town.

Izaak Walton believed that was true. After reading The Compleat Angler, I am having second thoughts, which is another way of saying I have recognized the need for better thoughts about wild places.

The book passed a critical test for me: It provoked some thoughts of my own.

But I don’t know what I’d say if someone asked if it belonged in the canon of Great Books or the Almost Great Books. Should everybody read it?

I think I’d reply that in the chapter on carp, there’s a recipe for a paste that you can use as bait. You mix up a goop, roll it into little balls and put them on your hook. The recipe begins:

 

Take the flesh of a Rabet or Cat cut smal …

 

I’m not competent to say about what an educated person should read. But The Compleat Angler is not for everyone.

• Source: Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 91.