Robert Finch

This is about crows. Or rather, this is about a crow. I stress the singular, because if there’s any lesson in the incident I’m about to relate, it’s to caution us against generalizing about other animal species. We’re all too quick to talk or write about “owls” or “woodcocks” or “whales,” as though each one we encounter is totally representative of all owls, woodcocks and whales, and that individuality is purely a human trait.

One day earlier this month, I took a walk out to the Marconi Station Site in South Wellfleet by way of Wireless Road. It was along this road that Guglielmo Marconi brought the materials to build his radio towers on the ocean bluff, the site from which he sent the first transatlantic wireless message to England on January 18, 1903.

Wild turkeys are a study in absurd elegance. Their body plumage resembles the overlapping scales of an armadillo — bronzed, metallic, armor-like.

I spent my teenage years in Parkersburg, West Virginia, a small city on the banks of the Ohio River. There’s not much about the town that would strike a visitor – or a resident, for that matter – as noteworthy.

Back in late December, on Christmas Eve to be exact, the Cape and Islands were pummeled by a massive transcontinental storm that had plowed across the Great Plains from Minnesota to Texas, bringing freezing gales and blizzard conditions to much of the Northeast.

Last December, I hired a local tree company to take down some pines on the north side of our house. On the face of it, cutting down trees doesn’t seem to be the thing to do in this era of climate change, since trees are excellent “carbon sinks,” storing vast amounts of carbon dioxide.

Stories in the natural world have no true beginnings or endings. In writing about them, we choose a place to start and a place to end, knowing that nature continues to write the story long after we have abandoned it.

My friend Ralph – as I’ve mentioned before on these broadcasts, has an uncanny eye for unusual things that most of us would overlook. But he outdid himself the other day when he showed me a picture he had taken of something that had washed up on the beach in Harwichport.

My father was a resourceful man. He had to be. He was the youngest in a family of seven. His father died when he was eleven, and he had to quit school to help support his family.