PETER QUINCE
There have been some signs of domestic maintenance work in our village rookery lately. I am always pleased to see this hint that the end of winter is approaching, although the rooks, I find, make cheerful neighbours all the year round. The rookery is in a group of old elm trees, and has been there for longer than anyone can remember; and as it happens to be only a couple of hun- dred yards from my windows I see a lot of the rooks' comings and goings. They are, in fact, the best of neighbours, in that they pro- vide an unfailingly interesting spectacle without ever becoming intrusive. Thus, they never come into the garden, much to my relief : the thought of those aggressive foragers at work among seeds and young plants would be enough to keep a gardener
awake at nights. On the other hand they lead such a busy, animated communal existence. and give such jolly displays of aerobatics, that I think I should miss their presence more than that of any other single species of bird.
Indeed, it is hard to Think of an English village without its rookery. This bird seems to have worked out the pattern of its associa- tion with man in a thoroughly satisfactory fashion. Rooks always choose to build their tree-top settlements close to man's dwellings; at any rate, I have never come across a rookery far from a village, in spite of what might seem the obvious attractions of woods or forests elsewhere. Yet they find their food out in the open farmland, leaving gardens and enclosed spaces alone. The rook's way of life, in fact, curiously resembles that of its human neighbours. It goes out into the fields to work by day and returns to the village to sleep at night.
There is also something reminiscent of human habits in its strong liking for the company of its own kind. When I came across a great flock of them in a field the other day I noticed that there were other fields all around which offered, presumably, much the same bill of fare to any hungry rook, but which were quite empty. If there is any practical value in this sociableness I am not clear what it might be. The likeliest ex- planation is simply that these birds like being in a crowd. When I appeared, they all had to get up into the air, cawing and protesting and generally making a great fuss over the intrusion; and, again as in the case of human beings, it seemed probable that having a good communal grumble at the in- convenience afforded a comforting release of irritation.
The rooks seem to converse with each other far more than most birds. Throughout the breeding season, especially, our rookery is in a constant hubbub. The rook has a remarkable voice, remarkable not for its musicality, which is negligible to my ears, but for its range of different sounds. It has even been said that it tries‘to sing in the spring, but this is something I have never detected; what it does do, beyond any ques- tion, is maintain a steady outpouring of croaks and clucks and calls of astonishing
variety.
I wish I knew what this incessant chiit- tering was all about. Song-birds, as we know, are for the most part singing in order to demarcate and defend their territory, but there seems no possible territorial ex- planation of the rook's noisy ways. So unless all this vocal activity is entirely pointless, it must represent a form of conversation. No ornithologist, so far as I am aware, has really explained it. E. M. Nicholson tentatively supports the theory that the rook's power of expression enables it to communicate more fully and effectively than most other birds, but, as he adds, our knowledge of rook language has not yet advanced sufficiently for us to be sure of this. It seems to suggest a fascinating field for research, nevertheless.
This apparent conversational prowess goes very well, of course, with the rook's ex- ceptionally developed communal sense. Many kinds of bird go about in flocks at cer- tain times of the year, but the rook lives in his own organised community all the year round, feeding and sleeping and playing with his tribe at all seasons. And anyone who thinks it is fanciful to speak of rooks 'playing', by the way, has clearly not observed them very closely. At times, especially on windy autumn days, they frolic about in the air with precisely the sort of boisterous enjoyment to be seen in a gang of small boys tobogganing.
It was this playfulness which won the ap- proval of the young King Arthur in T. H. White's chronicle (and White knew a great deal about birds): 'I love the way they enjoy flying. They don't just fly, like other birds, but they fly for fun. It is lovely when they hoist home to bed in a flock at night, all cheering and making rude remarks and pouncing on each other in a vulgar way. They turn over on their backs sometimes and tumble out of the air, just to be ridiculous ...'
As I said, I. would greatly miss the rooks if ever they abandoned our village. Not that there is any danger of that; they have lived here for umpteen centuries, adapting in robust fashion to the changing landscape, and no doubt they are perfectly capable of coping with any changes in store.
One very odd thing is that for all their permanence in the village scene most people, even country people, still get their name wrong and refer to them as 'crows'. Shakespeare made this mistake in Macbeth, telling how 'the crow/Makes wing to the rooky wood', thus enshrining in a phrase the ignorant error which persists to this day. There are in fact many differences between the rook and the carrion-crow, notably that the rook has a bare face-patch and the crow hasn't; but the best rule for distinguishing them was given to me years ago in these
• terms: 'If you see a lot of crows together, they're rooks; if you see a rook by itself, it's a crow.'
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