“While circling round and round,
They call their lifeless comrade from the ground.”
If he is wounded, and can flutter along the ground, the rooks appear to animate him to make fresh exertions by incessant cries, flying a little distance before him, and calling to him to follow them. I have seen one of my labourers pick up a rook so wounded, which he shot at for the purpose of putting him up as a scare-crow in a field of wheat; and while the poor wounded bird was still fluttering in his hand, I have observed one of his companions make a wheel round in the air, and suddenly dart past him so as almost to touch him, perhaps with a last hope that he might still afford assistance to his unfortunate mate or companion. Even when the dead bird has been hung, in terrorem, to a stake in the field, he has been visited by some of his former friends, but as soon as they found that the case was hopeless, they have generally abandoned that field altogether.
When one considers the instinctive care with which rooks avoid any one carrying a gun, and which is so evident, that I have often heard country-people remark that they can smell gunpowder, one can more justly estimate the force of their love or friendship in thus continuing to hover round a person who has just destroyed one of their companions with an instrument, the dangerous nature of which they seem fully capable of appreciating.
Rooks are not easily induced to forsake the trees on which they have been bred, and which they frequently revisit after the breeding season is over. This is shown in Hampton Court Park, where there is an extensive rookery among the fine lime-trees, and where a barbarous and unnecessary custom prevails of shooting the young rooks. As many as a hundred dozen of them have been killed in one season, and yet the rooks build in the avenue, though there is a corresponding avenue close by in Bushy Park, which they never frequent, notwithstanding the trees are equally high and equally secure. I never hear the guns go off during this annual slaughter without execrating the practice, and pitying the poor rooks, whose melancholy cries may be heard to a great distance, and some of whom may be seen, exhausted by their fruitless exertions, sitting melancholy on a solitary tree waiting till the sport is over, that they may return and see whether any of the offspring which they have reared with so much care and anxiety are left to them; or, what is more probable, the call for assistance of their young having ceased, they are aware of their fate, and are sitting in mournful contemplation of their loss. This may appear romantic, but it is nevertheless true; and whoever, like myself, has observed the habits and manners of the rook, and witnessed their attachment to each other and to their young,—and is convinced, as I am, that they have the power of communication by means of a language known to themselves, and are endowed with a knowledge and foresight most extraordinary, will take as much interest in them as I have confessed that I do.
A gentleman in this neighbourhood had two milk-white rooks in one nest. A booby of a carter, finding them before they were able to fly, threw them down, and destroyed them, to the regret of the owner, who would have been glad to have preserved such a curiosity in his rookery. I saw the birds myself nailed against the end of a barn, and was surprised to find that their bills, legs, feet, and claws were milk-white.
Passage hawks are also used for rooks. These birds sometimes mount like herons, but their flight is in general much lower. They must be found in an open country; and the wood, which is their place of retreat, must be so situated as to oblige them to fly against the wind to gain in.—Bewick—Daniel—Jesse—White’s Selborne—Sebright.
Rookery, s. A nursery of rooks.