Call of the Blue Crow

Desert Oracle Radio

Ken Layne

Society & Culture, Places & Travel, Philosophy

4.8 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Public-land managers in the US Southwest seem determined to drive the pinyon jay to extinction. A half-century attack on pinyon & juniper high-desert woodland has led to a 78% drop in pinyon jay populations just in the past 50 years. You can take action, and the Pinyon Juniper Alliance is a good place to start.

The pinyon jay is the steward of the pinyon forests, for which the forest feeds and houses this crucial blue crow. Of the thousands of pinyon nuts the blue crow puts away for the winter, usually working with its mate and both returning to the spot throughout the year to store or collect, the few pine nuts left behind grow into new pinyons, expanding the reach of the woodland. More woodland means more wildlife, more carbon-breathing conifers, more precious Western water stored in the ground, more wildlife corridors that connect mule deer and desert bighorn and mountain lions along mountain and valley to vast zones of wilderness.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.
0:09.8	Night has fallen on the desert.
0:16.4	The waxing crescent moon was especially beautiful last week, the glowing horns of Bale, the Bull King.
0:27.6	As he travels the evening sky with such power and glory.
0:34.4	Of course, it's not really a bull, it's the moon.
0:38.3	Nobody ever thought it was an actual bull, although that's what the experts will tell you.
0:45.3	These primitive morons believed an enormous bull was actually in the sky, perfectly camouflaged, except for the glow-in-the-dark horns.
0:58.3	Nobody ever thought that. Nobody ever believed the constellation Ursa Major was really a gigantic bear
1:09.0	floating up there in the northern sky
1:12.9	but it's a good story the way we learn things
1:16.2	oh that dominant group of northern stars
1:22.0	well that's the great bear
1:25.1	that's the nose way over there on the right.
1:31.0	And those are the legs.
1:33.6	Three of them, anyway.
1:35.9	And that's the body going to the left, to the west.
1:40.0	And that's the tail, I guess.
1:47.2	It's a bear with a long tail There's a story about that
1:53.4	And then wherever you lived in the northern hemisphere, there was a story.
2:07.1	For the Ashkosh and Wisconsin, a place where the people have always enjoyed ice fishing in winter.
2:15.9	The story is a dialogue between bear and fox.
2:22.4	Bear is hungry, and the fox gets all the fish, and then, just to be mean,
	...

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