Update: I just found out that I’m talking about two different kinds of crows: I was hearing fish crows — which go krokk, then maybe another krokk, then that’s it — and thinking they were American crows which go caw caw caw and never shut up. Never mind because we’re still presented with the mystery of what those close-mouthed fish crows are saying in so few words.
It’s spring, I think it’s spring, yes really, it’s spring, and I have to stop myself from writing about juiced-up kids and hormonal robins and the flourishing minor bulbs, all sproinging all over the place like little fireworks. It’s true that they’re the incarnation of spring but I’ve written and written about them and you don’t need to hear it all again. I was thinking about what else to write about, out on my walk in the morning, and the crows from one patch of trees were crossing the sky to another patch of trees and talking as they went. They weren’t yelling in long sentences the way they usually do; they were talking casually in single words — a quiet krokk, then another one, krokk. They sounded like country people talking over coffee, keeping it short and to the necessities:
“Wet spring.”
“Yes.”
They sounded like my grandmother and her sister playing cards:
(slap a card down) “Do you believe in an afterlife?”
(slap a card down) “No.”
I heard them say this, it was like music: slap, fundamental question, slap, devastating answer, end of conversation. I never forgot it. Anyway I thought I would write about what crows talk about.
A stag, appearing in one of the Ashmole manuscripts held at the Bodleian Library.
I.
One autumn evening several years ago I was driving—I should admit it, I was flying—north on New York state’s Taconic Parkway when I spotted a white tailed deer at the side of the road. It isn’t unusual to see them along the Taconic, especially in the fall, when the rut makes them a little crazy, and a lot more likely to nose into human zones like backyards, ballfields, highways. My family and I make that drive often enough that my sons are used to hearing me yell “Deer!” without warning.
But this time I said, “Oh, dear.”
And my oldest son, clocking tone, sat up in the backseat and said, “What’s wrong?”
The doe lay not just by the road but very nearly in it: right on the shoulder, a foot or two from our bumper. I remember her calm, almost sleepy expression, the way she did not flinch as our mad metal capsule hurtled by. She’d been badly banged up. Blood striped her chest and flank. Before we’d even cleared her length I understood that she’d been hit by a car and had been able to drag herself to the edge of the tar but no farther. Almost as quickly I heard myself say, partly to my son and mostly to myself, “She’ll be alright.”
But I knew it probably wasn’t true. More likely she’d be dead soon. My son seemed to understand this, too, and our car was suddenly swamped with with emotion. He was near tears for the doe, and I was upset because I didn’t know what to do. It’s one thing to see a carcass at the side of the road—the action is over. To see an animal hurt and slowly fading, that’s something else. In truth I knew there was little I could do. Call the cops, maybe try to find a number for the state department of conservation. In either case the response, if there was one, would be slow and late and would end the same way.
Much later I would learn that, legally speaking, I really wasn’t allowed to do anything for or to or with that doe. But in the moment, between my own sadness and the sound of my kid’s fresh grief, what I remember was helplessness, and the weirdly rational question that snaked up through it all: Who is responsible for this animal?
II.
It’s estimated that some 30 million white-tailed deer now roam the U.S. New York State alone is home to a million or more. The numbers have been routinely used to support a story of conservation success, and they are in fact pretty striking when you consider that only about a century ago deer had nearly been wiped out of New York and many other parts of the country. And yet, in slightly more than a human lifespan, they have made a spectacular comeback, unlike that of any other large North American mammal. At a time when other cervids—some elk and almost all caribou, for example—aren’t fairing well, deer appear to be thriving.
The reasons for this are myriad, and they mostly have to do with us humans. First, settlers killed them for the leather business and for food, beginning in the colonial era and continuing on through Gilded Age. Then, when they’d been reduced continent-wide to a shade of their pre-colonial population, we attempted to atone for the slaughter with conservation and game management. Deer also get credit for their comeback. They’re resilient and highly adaptable creatures. Synanthrope is the technical term: an animal that has learned how to exist in the human-altered world. It turns out that what they needed most was time—time to figure us out, and to fit themselves into the gray spaces that still surround us.
Today deer are our shadows, our doppelgängers, their eyes reflecting back to us from the sides of highways the choices we have made and unmade, the landscapes we have deforested and reforested, developed and abandoned. One researcher in New York recently told me that our modern way of living in America has “created perfect deer habitat. We are subsidizing them.”
And now, many researchers agree, there are too many. This is as measured by the impact they have on our forests, which in the northeast are being pushed to collapse under the braided strains of climate change, development, and the enormous appetites of deer.
III.
Long after my family’s encounter with the dying doe, she was still haunting me. I think of her more often than I’d like, and when her face surfaces in memory so does the that unsettling question: Who is responsible for this animal?
In New York, deer are not considered beings, or persons, but objects. When it comes to ownership (a term which implies responsibility), they might be considered res nullius—a Latin legal term that translates to “nobody’s thing.” But this only means that the animals do not belong to any individual person. Instead, all of them belong to all of us, the citizens of New York, and it’s legally up to the state to take responsibility for managing this common property. The state does this through a series of laws and regulations that are invisible to most people most of the time, except when it comes to interacting with deer. Humans are officially discouraged or legally forbidden from almost every kind of direct interaction with the animals. It’s possible to argue that this is intended to keep both humans and deer safe, though it gets weird when you remember that deer are objects, like toasters, or tires.
Things get stranger when you consider that one of the very few acceptable ways for a human to interact with a deer is to kill it. This can legally be done only after buying a permit. And, generally speaking, killing a deer (or “taking” it) is the only way by which the animal can be transferred from one property category to another, from an object we hold in common to one that a private person can own exclusively.
Obviously these rules and legal standards were of no use to us, or the doe, on the parkway that night. Had she been dead, we might have called a state official and tried to claim the body; I’ve read that people occasionally do this and receive permission to haul the roadkill home. But because she was still alive, she was also still an object held in common by some 20 million New Yorkers. It meant, of course, that she would remain nobody’s thing.
IV.
One of the ways that deer destroy forests is by being choosy. They prefer to eat certain things—oak saplings, maples, native wildflowers—and they keep nibbling until everything’s gone. Then the deer move on to plants that are less desirable. You can walk through many northeastern forests today and see the results: an understory that’s isn’t so much an ecosystem as it is a bare cupboard. Down below the canopy, deer have mowed down almost everything they can reach. Such forests may not seem barren at first—the big mature trees are still there, after all—but linger a while and you’ll almost certainly notice that something’s wrong. The woods are quieter, emptier, stiller. No saplings, no flowers. The big trees are being prevented from reproducing. Without small plants and flowers the birds and pollinators, along with other species, are gone. Such a forest will slowly become a kind of memorial to taste: if something manages to grow, it will be because deer don’t want to eat it.
So far there is no consensus on what to do about the deer. Hunting has traditionally been the preferred management tool. Many Americans love hunting, or at least say they do, and the hunting industry lobbies extensively to encourage management practices that keep deer populations high. But experts I’ve spoken with say there’s no way hunting alone will save forests. There are simply too many deer, and too few hunters. In New York, during the 2024-2025 hunting season, something like 223,000 deer were reduced to private property. This number blows my mind—223,000 of anything is a lot—but the state considers it a stable “harvest.” This is to say the hunting season did not significantly reduce the deer population. Even now, as I write, there are still a million or so of them out there, eating through the dusk.
I have come to think that one of our big deer problems is in classification. Because they are objects rather than, say, non-human persons, we’re never really encouraged or allowed to develop relationships with them outside the framework of killing and ignoring. They may sometimes be called pests, chewing up the yard shrubs, or they may be hazards when they leap into the road at night. But because they are res nullius, actual responsibility—the kind that would honestly wrestle with their destructive effect on the landscape—seems beyond our grasp. We seem content, as I was that day, to keep on driving.
The purity of the unchanged treble loomed large in my English childhood. It might been something to do with the 500-year-old tradition of May Morning, seen here in the earliest known recording. At the tolling of six in the morning, Oxford’s townspeople gather on the street to hear the Magdalen College choir sing Hymnus Eucharisticus from the Great Tower, those boy soprano voices soaring in the dawn stillness. The strings of a Stradivarius could not produce a sound as fine, we believed, as the well-trained larynx of a pre-pubescent male.
But what likely did it for me was actually a Channel 4 animated film that came out when I was tiny: The Snowman. It featured a boy whose snowman came to life, then took his hand and flew with him to the North Pole one night to visit Father Christmas. The pivotal scene featured an absolute banger, if you’re a little girl being raised in the classical music tradition: “Walking in the Air”.
I wore out the family record player listening to the recording, which turned out to be sung by a different treble (Aled Jones) than had performed for the film (Peter Auty), the reason being that the first boy’s voice had broken in the brief window between the film and the album. The bottled perfection of that voice proved as ephemeral as the snowman, who melts at the end of the film with Velveteen Rabbit-style pathos.
Embellishments to this type of choir music come in the form of trilled R’s—no slides, no scoops, no vibrato. In fact, I grew up feeling that the warbling of vibrato, so prevalent in American singing (and, of course, in opera), masked a failure to properly hit and hold a note. It was all about ethereal, glassy, focused notes for me.
Imagine my surprise when I learned that with properly controlled conditions, nobody can reliably tell a girl chorister from a boy one. The elevation of the boy treble turns out to be mostly about the exclusion of girls and women from yet another sphere of the church. I hope you’ll forgive me, then, for setting aside that inconvenient truth.
It strikes me both as a radical act of love for his own inner child and, equally, an act of acceptance for his less sought-after “broken” voice with its gentler, supporting role. Is the result so harmonious because both tracks are the same voice? Is he the same person?
Am I? I’m back in Oxford this week and now have decades of cultural experience outside the place to give me perspective. I no longer unquestioningly venerate one particular tradition. But I can still hear the echo of my childhood values, sing a duet with my younger self—and find meaning in the harmony.
Image: May Morning on Magdalen College, Oxford, Ancient Annual Ceremony, by William Holman Hunt (1888)
Did you ever have to memorize the prologue to The Canterbury Tales? I did, for high school English class, spring semester of senior year. I was cranky about it—why do we have to recite this stuff?—but as with most things I didn’t want to learn, I’m glad I did. Every springtime I think of the opening lines: “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote…” For anybody who hasn’t read it (or hasn’t read it in a while), the prologue explains that it’s April, sweet showers have ended the misery of winter, flowers are blooming, birds are singing, and people long to go on pilgrimages to give thanks for surviving the winter. The pilgrims meet up on their road trip to Canterbury and share their tales. (Kind of like we do on this group blog, The Last Word on Nothing.)
I was trying to remember the lines of the Prologue the other day while biking along the Potomac River (as well as the lines to Forgetfulness, a poem about forgetting poems). I stopped at a cliff face to watch a pair of peregrine falcons fighting with a pair of ravens for control of a nest. The ravens built the nest a few years ago, the peregrines stole it, and the ravens were now trying to take it back. The peregrines won. I also saw an eagle on a nest and another peregrine near the Harper’s Ferry nesting site. (If you want to see peregrines on a nest, a third site, near Point of Rocks along the C&O Canal, is a short walk upstream from the parking area. Look for all the photographers and birders.)
I’m so grateful. Grateful that we survived the winter. Grateful that peregrine falcons and bald eagles survived DDT. Those pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales were looking for adventure and fellowship, sure, but they were also expressing their gratitude. In their case, they were making a pilgrimage to the shrine of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was martyred in 1170 by King Henry II’s knights and became a saint.
It’s such a human impulse, to give thanks for things that feel miraculous. Those of us who aren’t religious don’t have the same shrines, rituals, or regularly scheduled fellowship, but we do have secular saints, people who made the world better or saved our lives. We don’t pray to them, exactly, but it’s inspiring to remember them, appreciate them. I would gladly light a candle and leave an offering at a shrine to Saint Rachel of Carson.
In his book, Eric weaves together science and stories centered on seabirds to explore the effects of climate change on the ecology of the North Pacific. Things are changing fast, and on a huge scale that is difficult to comprehend. But Eric skillfully gets at this big, dynamic picture by going deep on smaller pieces, including birds, people, fish, currents, islands, and lighthouses.
It’s a fun read, with lots of surprising and interesting elements. I was most intrigued by one of the central characters of the book, the rhinoceros auklet. The name comes from an actual horn these birds grow at the base of their beaks during the breeding season and then shed every year. They are smaller relatives of the puffin, and make the most ridiculously fun sounds.
Here’s an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length (and for the annoying number of questions I asked about auklets).
Last fall I visited the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, where I stumbled across two fishbowls brimming with gallstones. They were donated, according to the placard, by a pathologist named Dr. S. Robert Freedman.
Why, I wondered in an earlier post, would Dr. Freedman keep so very many stones? I couldn’t ask him — Freedman, a pathologist in Los Gatos, California, died in 2021 — so I did the next best thing. I called his wife and daughter.
Tomorrow, I fly down to the Magellanic penguin colony at Punta Tombo, Argentina,to apply some small tracking tags to penguins before they set off on their journeys north. I wrote this post a few years ago at the end of the same sort of trip, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing the penguins make similar progress from being disheveled to sleek.
Brown
Penguins are black and white—everyone knows this—except when they aren’t, like in April, at a place called Punta Tombo. Punta Tombo is a gnarled peninsula in southern Argentina that hosts a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Every September, more than two hundred thousand of them come here to breed. They pair up, lay a clutch of two eggs, incubate those eggs, have a brood of two chicks, feed those chicks, and, finally, watch those chicks strike off on their own. The luckiest penguins go through all those steps over the course of several months. The vast majority of penguins are not that lucky, however. Some never find a mate, or a kelp gull eats their eggs, or their chicks starve, and so on. Sometimes I am astonished at all the ways they can be unlucky. Even so, no matter the outcome of the breeding season, once March and April arrive, every single penguin molts.
The molt seems to me a harsh way to close the year. Some birds only molt a few feathers at a time so they can keep living their lives more or less unaffected by the need for new plumage. Not so Magellanic penguins. Magellanic penguins undergo what is called a catastrophic molt, which means they replace all their feathers at the same time. To prepare for this involved procedure, they first leave the colony for two or three weeks to stuff themselves with food. When they return, they settle in a nest, or sometimes just a patch of open ground, and stop preening and oiling their feathers. Deprived of care and oil, the feathers soon lose their lustrous blackness, fading to brown. The colony fills with brown penguins.
This is the first stage of the molt. Because we are creative, we call it Brown. Think of it as the beginning of the end.
