Six Things, Volume 41
Crows | Internet | Time | Fonts | Photos | Game
Thing 1 – Crows
I had to have a word with myself the other day.
I was out looking for birds, as is often the way. I’d seen curlews – three groups, seven birds each, flying from the roost at daybreak, silhouette distinctive in the post-storm morning sky; I’d seen sparrowhawks – a pair of them circling the cricket club as if capturing drone footage; I’d heard the paper-thin piping of goldcrests from the canopy above, taunting me with their invisibility; once emerged from the woods onto the moor above, I’d even seen a pair of whooper swans, high high high and even higher, visible only with binoculars and even then you’re lucky if you find them against the vast expanse of sky, but once you get them you don’t let go, drinking in every movement of those vast wings, the effort, the strain, the purpose of it visible even from god-knows-how-far-away.
A movement, origin unknown. A glitch in the matrix, manifesting as a flurry of foliage. Binoculars trained, senses alert, the vaguest impression of something not normal.
IT MIGHT BE SOMETHING RARE.
So often, these birds don’t show themselves, instead disappearing into the depths of the bush/tree/hedge, destined to remain unidentified for ever.
This one doesn’t do that. It emerges, bringing with it a faint sense of disappointment.
“Oh, just a crow.”
No. No no no no no.
Not ‘just’ a crow.
My mantra – I admit it can veer towards the over-earnest at times – is that everything’s interesting if looked at it in the right way. It’s my stock response when asked the age-old ‘non-birder to binoculars-user’ question: “Seen anything interesting?”
I allow a semi-maniacal gleam to come into my eye.
“It’s all interesting.”
Strange, the allure of the rarity (because that’s what people mean by 'interesting’, really – not the interest of the commonplace, but a Notable Sighting). A few years ago a European robin – emblem of ubiquity in British gardens – turned up in Beijing. ‘Twitchers flocked’, as the headlines usually have it.
A reminder that everything is rare somewhere, and a prompt not to take the commonplace for granted.
Crows, though. They’re boring, right? Monochrome, brutish things, cawing and cackling scavengers, liable to peck the eyes out of a sheep at the drop of a hat. (#NotAllCorvids) But if you’re upset about that, just wait till you hear about the exploits of parasitoid wasps. Or cats. Or humans.
What can I say? Nature is cruel. Life is cruel.
This crow wasn’t pecking anything out of anything. It did the characteristic hop-jump away from me across the grass and flew off, rowing gamely across the sky and making light of the healthy buffeting it received from a fickle and disruptive wind. And thinking about my instinctive reaction – ‘just a crow’ – I not only had a word with myself but started compiling a list.
List Of Reasons Not To Say ‘Just A Crow’
Cleverness. Crows – and other members of the corvid family – are problem-solvers. Here’s a Caledonian Crow getting to grips with the concept of water displacement.
Maths. And if you’re not impressed by that, how about the recent discovery that they can, and do, use statistical inference (choosing between two images the one that is, based on past experience, most likely to result in a reward)? Or maybe their ability to grasp the concept of zero?
No?
Tough crowd.
DIY. Perhaps you’ll read this, which details not just their use of tools but their realisation that hooked ones are more useful than non-hooked ones and therefore worth taking care of, and offer a grudging trickle of applause?
Oh come on.
Sidebar: the phrase ‘crow tools’ inevitably calls to mind Gary Larson’s misunderstood cartoon ‘cow tools’, the apology for which appeared 41 years ago today in The Spokesman-Review, Spokane (thanks to Chris Coates for this).
Look, corvids impersonate human speech, hold funerals, engage in internecine battles, recognise faces and hold grudges – if that doesn’t strike an anthropomorphic chord, then God, Jed, I don’t even want to know you.
And if you take the view that to earn our respect they need to buckle down and do a job of work, how about this?
Mind you, even in the face of all that evidence of corvid intelligence, you’ll still have a hard time convincing some people.
Let’s say we don’t take intelligence as a marker of potential interest. The distinction between topological and metric interactions in flocking jackdaws might have passed you by – let it pass no longer, because this thread, explaining what that means and how they manifest, is fascinating.
Sidebar: the thread mentions this beautiful jackdaw print, by the excellent Littleramstudio. Get it, and their other stuff, here.
Finally, crows’ beaks have inspired a new design for tweezers.
Defence rests.
‘Just a crow’? Never.
Thing 2 – Internet
If you were infuriated by the Password Game I shared in Volume 25, you might be wary of anything presented by Neal Agarwal.
Fear not. This Museum of the History of the Web not only does what it says on the tin, but plenty more. Whether you want to find out exactly what it was your parents had to put up with in the prehistoric days of dial-up, look up the first webcam, MP3 or online pizza delivery site, or revisit that game you got so addicted to in 2003 that you lost your job, this is the place for you. Really nicely put together, with loads of clickable links, playable games and watchable videos (thrill to the confusion of the 1994 Today Show presenters as they discuss exactly what ‘@‘ means).
Thing 3 – Time
The clocks changed last night – or [insert number of days pertaining to when you read this] ago – so we’ve graduated from BST (British Summer Time) and are now on BCADT (British Chilly And Damp Time). And when I say ‘we’ you can bet I mean ‘people who live where I live’ – do amend your records if you live somewhere else.
The biannual (as opposed to biennial, the two words being frustratingly similar but meaning different things, although I see from my Collins dictionary that ‘biannual’ can, albeit rarely, mean ‘a biennial’, which is just plain silly) BUT I DIGRESS – that parenthesis just grabbed the sentence and took it over completely, so I’ll start again.
The biannual kerfuffle about clocks going backwards and forwards, whether it is strictly necessary, and whether we’d be better off without it – I am agnostic on the subject, and easily confused by the arguments for and against, so just pootle onwards without caring much either way – always brings to mind this bit by Jay Foreman about the silliest time zones in the world.
and, as night follows day, I then think of this scene from The West Wing.
Thing 4 – Fonts
Fonts fonts fonts. All the fonts you can handle.
Thing 5 – Photomicrography
The world of the very very small holds a special fascination, as anything on a non-human scale tends to. And the photographs on show in the Nikon Small World Photomicrography competition take us into it in sometimes almost unbelievable detail.
Favourites may vary. There is, as advertised above, interest to be found in the commonplace, or things that might at first seem uninviting. The words ‘slime mold’, for example, conjure an image altogether less appealing than the extraordinary reality. And if you’re turned off by the idea of algae from a mud puddle, you might want to reconsider when you see the image in question. You might be more beguiled by the extraordinary colours and patterns of caffeine crystals than the muscle architecture of an evaginating tapeworm – and if that one is too much for you, perhaps inanimate objects are more your thing, and you’ll be thrilled by the drama of a matchstick igniting by the friction surface of the box, or the texture of a platinum spark plug.
Thing 6 – Game
Do you want a game that in the first instance is obscurely satisfying but gradually becomes just a bit frustrating, but then you think AHA I know now how I will achieve success so you play it just one more time and then one more time and before you know it it’s nearly midnight but of course you get an extra hour tonight so why not just one more game?
You’re in luck. It turns out I have just such a game.
Never “just a crow,” or gull raven goose jay chickadee nuthatch. Everything IS interesting, and if it’s not, I need to slow down and get over myself. I enjoy your six things; thank you for sharing. That photomicrography!
Brilliant post. I am a big crow lover so this hit the mark for me, thank you.