"Two Crows,'' by JAMES REED, in his show at Gallery19,  in Essex, Conn., through June 3o.

Crows, which are highly intelligent, if often associated with death,  have a very effective business model as scavengers.  Indeed, being a good scavenger of things and ideas seems essential for the  long-term success of most of us.  (A successful investor is a particularly good scavenger -- an outstanding opportunist.)

When I was a kid living on thepre-environmentalist coast, seagulls were protected because they cleaned up the garbage left in the open. They did a particularly fine job on the remnants of beach picnics. Crows do the same thing and swiftly consume roadkill, too.

Essex, by the way, is a beautiful town on the Connecticut River, one of several beautiful communities in its area. New England is not famous for its big rivers, of which the Connecticut is the only one, and doesn't have many of what you would call "river towns''  in, say, a Midwestern or Southern sense.

But  the Connecticut looks pretty big in the southern Nutmeg State and Essex is definitely a river town, with all that implies about water-borne transportation, commerce and culture in general.