ROOKS AND ROOKERIES.
110 282 EDITOR Or SIMI/TAU/R.1 StE,.—You may think it worth while to place on record the following instance of the courage and pertinacity of rooks, and of the way in which, for reasons doubtless clear to themselves,
but difficult for human beings to understand, they will fix upon a certain tree, or trees, and decide at all hazards to found a rookery there. When the late Lady Holland wae living at St. Anne's Hill, she used, as some of her Surrey neighbours will remember, to take extraordinary pains to preserve and attract the small bird-life of the place. No small bird or its nest might be touched, and if a gardener found a dead bird he was supposed, as one of them told me, "to bury it respectably." But jays, magpies, and rooks Lady Holland could not abide. Rooks especially were to be shot down ; and their destruction was in some way, the easier, because every spring a number of them would insist on trying to build in a particular tree near the house. Every spring they were shot at until they gave up the attempt, and ebety succeeding spring they returned. This went on year after year for many years, until Lady Holland died in 1888, and the rooks were left in peace. By the following spring there was a flourishing rookery in the forbidden tree, and there has been a rookery in the grounds
• ever since. I was talking over the vagaries of rooks the other day with an old gardener. "They are wonderful birds," he
• said. "They won't build in a tree that's marked to come down." Rooks undoubtedly have their own methods of dis- covering when a tree is dying, or when its branches are
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