The Crow and the Fox

A crow sat high on a branch with a piece of cheese in her beak. A fox below wanted that cheese. He looked up and praised her loudly.

“What a fine bird!” he said. “What lovely feathers! If your voice matches your looks, you ought to be queen of the birds.”

The crow, pleased, opened her beak to caw and show she could sing. The cheese dropped. The fox snatched it up. “You have a voice,” he said. “What you need is wits.”

About this fable

Vernon Jones titles this fable “The Fox and the Crow” in his Aesop’s Fables: A New Translation of 1912. His telling is only a few sentences long and ends with the fox’s mocking advice about wits.

The French poet Jean de La Fontaine later retold the same scene in verse as “Le Corbeau et le Renard,” one of the first fables in his collection of 1668, with the same contrast between flattering words and the fox’s appetite. Nothing has been softened here.

Read the original: V. S. Vernon Jones, Aesop’s Fables: A New Translation (Project Gutenberg #11339)

Best for ages 3–5 — a one-scene fable that is easy to act out with a fox, a crow and a pretend piece of cheese.

A closer reading

The fox does not ask for the cheese. He offers the crow a chance to prove something flattering about herself, and that proof requires the exact action that releases her food. The compliment, the requested performance and the fox’s reward form one mechanism.

The last insult is spoken by the thief, so it need not be accepted as a fair verdict on the crow’s worth. Enjoying praise is ordinary, and sincere compliments exist. The useful question is whether the praise pressures someone into an action that benefits the speaker at their expense.

Try this with the story

Use a paper crow and a pretend cheese held in its beak; do not ask children to hold objects in their mouths. Pause before the caw and identify what opening the beak will do. Give the crow a reply that lets her enjoy the compliment while keeping the cheese safe.

Talk about it

• What does the fox want, and what does he pretend to want?
• What action makes the cheese fall?
• Could the crow accept a compliment without doing what the fox hopes?

More stories like this

• The Fox and the Grapes — another Aesop fox who wants food that is just out of reach
• The Crow and the Pitcher — a crow who solves a different problem by testing a practical idea
• The Dog and His Reflection — an animal who loses his food by opening his mouth at the wrong moment