A Cape Cod Notebook

Holy mackerel: The “lowly” fish that created Cape Cod’s prosperity

I keep track of the lilac bushes on my way to work, tiny buds as tight as a fist start to slowly unfurl as the calendar turns to May. The peeper frogs have been at it for weeks now, their electric chorus ringing out in the night. Lengthening days are our reward for an endless winter.

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.

I hadn’t been out to the South Shore since last December, when weeks of high wind revealed the bones of an ancient shipwreck.

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.

We drive down Hummock Pond Road, where a concrete Jersey barrier marks the end of the asphalt and the beginning of the sea. It’s a shorter drive from town than all the way out to Madaket, and besides, there isn’t really a parking lot at Madaket Beach anymore, the erosion has taken big bites out of the pavement.