What a wonderful thing it is, the return of the rooks to any given place.
For months they had been absent from this spot, gone nobody knows where. Not a sign of them. And then, almost to a day, they reappeared, and claimed their own tree and branch; and each pair, I fancy, went back to the site of its former nest. Curious stories are told of the sagacity of rooks, of their self-government, and of how offenders who have disobeyed some common law have been executed before large numbers, evidently as a judgment, and as a warning to others.
As I watched them, a story bearing out the truth of this statement came back to me. In the rookery of a friend there was hatched, I was told, a rook with white wings. The community did not make any objection to the youngster being reared there; but when, the following year, the white-winged bird returned to an old avenue of elms, where he had been hatched, exception was taken to his desire to nest there. It seemed, said my friend, as if a congress was called, and as if the strangely marked rook and his mate were given the option to fly elsewhere, or receive some dire punishment; for at intervals they were chased away, but kept on returning to the same spot. All day, rooks seemed, said my informant, to flock to the avenue, till the air seemed almost black with them. They flew, cawed wildly, and seemed in a highly excited state. This went on hour after hour, without any apparent change; until at last one old bird descended from the branch on which he had been perched, and standing on the grass, flapped his wings slowly, uttering a strange, low, mysterious cry, more like the husky croaking of a carrion crow than the cawing of a rook. In a moment the whole grove, said my informant, resounded with the cries of the rooks, and one and all simultaneously fell upon the unfortunate bird with the white wings, screaming and cawing, and never rested until they had pecked him to death, and torn almost every feather out of his helpless body.
I recalled this curious story, and then watched the birds as they flew round, finding sticks for their nests. Ash sticks seemed to be their favourite material, or twigs from the great wych-elm a field away.
The rooks seemed, to quote a boyish expression, “to build fair,” quite different from the mischievous jackdaws, “who will allus rather thieve than work,” as an old keeper once said to me.
It is curious how rooks change their food during the different months of the year. They feed their young almost entirely on animal food till they leave the nest. As a rule, they give the young rooks, grubs, worms and cockchafers; but during the very dry summers that closed the nineteenth century, being short of insect food, the old birds took to robbing hen-coops, and fell also upon young pheasants and partridges in the grass. Several keepers have told me that they were obliged to destroy whole rookeries on this account, for when a rook once takes to chickens or pheasants, like a man-eating tiger, he will never return to humbler diet.
It is wonderful how tenacious rooks are, of returning year after year to the same place, and how difficult it is for any one to start a new colony. Nests may be put up, and young birds partially tamed, but it is a hard matter, as a gardener once said to me, “to ’tice the rooks against their will; ’tis like callin’ the wild geese, unless they wish to hear.”
ROOKS LEAVE FOR A DEATH
In the South there is a strong belief that when the rooks abandon a rookery some misfortune will happen to the owner. At Chilton Candover it is said, there was much excitement because the rooks in Lady Ashburton’s park unaccountably forsook their nests. Almost immediately afterwards occurred Lady Ashburton’s death, and many stories of a similar character are told.
As I leant over the fence, watching what was going on in the rookery, I heard a strange low cry in the distance, as of something unearthly and eërie—what Bess once said sounded like the “call-note of a witch.” I remarked in the great black bird that came overhead, a different flight, slower and heavier than that of a rook, and I recognized in the bird approaching a carrion crow.