PROPHETIC ROOKS.
It is an old belief that those wise birds the rooks desert treacherous trees. If a tree is weak no nest is built on it. Here is a modern instance that may illustrate the causes of such desertion. Last year there stood at a distance of about two hundred yards two lines of tall elms one of which only was used as a rookery. The easterly line, which had never harboured a nest, was cut down in order to make place for a new road. This year for the first time within recent memory the remaining line of trees, which are firm and fine and quite unthreatened, is without a nest : the rooks have departed from their old home. What is the inference ? The incident at any rate suggests that rooks do not always desert a dangerous tree because of any in• stinctive sense of its instability. They argue that if one tree falls in the neighbourhood it is at least likely that another may fall. Underneath the very newest rookery that I know lie the remnants of a number of fallen elms ; but the survivors were not chosen for a site till some ten years after the latest fall. * *
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