Falling into a brown study

— Photo by Maciej Boryna

Chrysanthemums can survive well into mild Novembers.

A prince of November

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

November is a gray and brown time, making it  the winner in the saddest-month-of-the year contest for many. Still, it can sometimes have a placid,  mellow, misty, soothing quality, or it can energize us with a  stirring nor’easter.

You might be tempted these days to pick up a rotting apple on the ground in an orchard and taste it, and you have to admire a Norway maple that hasn’t yet dropped its leaves as mild weather seems to last later and later in the fall. You notice the beautiful patterns on bark, painted with lichen, more than you had a couple of months ago, when you were distracted by the vivid colors of many growing plants.

November is also prime time for  gatherings of crows, those highly intelligent and social birds that seem to take over as we head closer to winter. You often see them on streets feasting on dead squirrels killed by cars as they try to collect acorns. But they’re also adept at splatting your car with revolting off-white poop. Do they do it on purpose?

Crafty crows

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Crows seem to be most excitable in November, at least in New England.

From crows.net:

“This {mid-November to mid-December} is the time when the big communal roosts are forming…arge number of crows will be gathering together in the evenings to spend the night in roosts that may contain anywhere from several hundred to tens of thousands of crows. Crows from a fairly large geographical area, covering a circle with perhaps a 20 mile or larger radius, will begin flying in the late afternoon or early evening towards a central roost location. It appears that in many cases, crows from various parts of the area served by the roost will stop at one or more staging area along the way where groups of crows gather and remain a short time before proceeding to the main roost. To use a human analogy, one might say that families of crows proceed to staging areas, where the clans gather, before flying on to gather as a tribe at the roost….”

“Although roosts may occur in a wide variety of surroundings, most commonly they are found in areas with large, mature trees not growing to densely, relatively near a water source such as a river or lake. In cities favorite areas seem to be cemeteries, college campuses, parks, malls, railroad yards, and old industrial areas.’’

No wonder they like our neighborhood so much!

They sure drop massive quantities of guano on our cars. But they sure do a great job removing the bodies of car-squashed squirrels from the roads.

Much has been made of recent research showing the high intelligence of crows and ravens, which look like crows but are larger. Parrots and the corvid family of crows, ravens and jays are considered the most intelligent birds.

They can, for example, remember individual humans, count and use tools. This naturally leads people, as they do with, particularly, their dogs and cats, to assign them human qualities. It’s as if we want to expand our human community to include other species as subsidiaries of us, the ruling class. But of course, whatever their range of intelligence, including emotional intelligence, they live in worlds far different from ours. Beware anthropomorphizing them.

To read more, please this link.

“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.’’

-- Alexander Pope

Back to the disability-pension trough

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

If only more humans had the anti-sucker capabilities of members of the corvid family. This quote is from The Economist:

“Members of the corvid family, including crows, ravens, rooks and magpies, are known to be unusually intelligent birds capable of keeping track of complex social relationships. Magpies can recognize themselves in mirrors; rooks and crows make and use tools. Ravens and jays can remember which of their group mates were watching when they hid food; American crows can remember the face of a dangerous human years after a single encounter. In the latest example of corvid ingenuity, detailed this month in the journal Animal Behaviour, nine ravens played a simple food-trading game with researchers—and were able to remember, a month later, which humans had behaved fairly or unfairly. They would then choose to avoid playing with humans who treated them badly.’’

And now on to humans:

This is so predictable: When Rhode Island’s unemployment rate is low, as it is now, public-employee unions move in to grab rich new perks from their allies in the General Assembly. These slam state and municipal budgets when the economy goes down (as it’s likely to do over the next year). During the  ‘70s and ‘80s, we saw vast pension-benefit increases at the state and municipal levels, which  turned into fiscal disasters when the economy went south in the early ‘90s.

And so in the legislative session just, if incompletely, ended were two potentially gigantic and unaffordable giveaways. One allows indefinite extension of expired municipal labor contracts. That means that very generous contracts signed in a time of relative prosperity could go on and on in a time of recession-caused falling tax revenues.

The other part of the raid is that the General Assembly has approved even richer tax-free disability pensions for police and firefighters by allowing “illnesses sustained while in the performance of duty’’ as acceptable reasons for getting a tax-free disability pension – allowing decades of affluence for many more pensioners (many of whom get another job after leaving public employment). As I’ve written,  this bill, sponsored by legislators swimming in conflicts of interest, would mean that they could claim cardiovascular disease – extremely common and the most frequent cause of death in America! – as a reason to get big disability pensions.  Or skin cancer, contracted from spending a lot of time outside. Or many other  common ailments.

The disability pension system for police officers and firefighters is already widely abused. It’s depressing that the General Assembly would be willing to make it worse.

Let’s hope that Gov. Gina Raimondo has the fortitude to confront this raid on the treasury and veto both these deals.