The Crow and the Pitcher

A thirsty crow finds a jug. The water is too low for her beak and the jug is far too heavy to tip. Both of the obvious moves are closed.

What the story does

She drops in a pebble. The water rises — hardly at all, but it rises. So she fetches another, and another, and another, until her wings ache and the little pile beside her is gone. Then the water comes up to meet her and she drinks.

The repetition in the middle is the whole fable, which is why the retelling says it as repetition rather than summarising it. “She solved it with pebbles” is a different and much weaker story, because it removes the only evidence the moral rests on: that it took many goes, and that most of them looked like nothing was happening.

The moral, in plain words

The traditional moral is usually given as necessity is the mother of invention, and sometimes as little by little does the trick. The second is the one the story actually dramatises, so that is the one this version keeps:

A problem too big to move in one go can still be moved in many small ones. Patience is not waiting. Patience is working in pieces.

That distinction is the useful part for a child. Patience is often taught as sitting still, which is not what the crow does — she works the entire time, and what she needs is the tolerance for progress too small to see.

Talking about it afterwards

Two questions that tend to open it up:

• What did the crow do when the first pebble barely worked?
• Can you think of something you are doing in pieces right now?

Attribution

Aesop, The Crow and the Pitcher (Perry 390). The fable is ancient and in the public domain. The wording in this video is original — a retelling rather than a transcription of any particular translation, so no translator’s text is being read aloud.

Nothing in it is violent, frightening or unsafe: the bird meets an obstacle and solves it by working.