Rooks and Men: Allies of Civil Life

Rooks and Men: Allies of Civil Life

Article printed in the London Times dealing with the habits of rooks in British gardens.

"A Correspondent"

The Times Digital Archive, Gale Primary Sources: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CS152636026/TTDA?u=loyolau&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=de813217

Newspaper Article, Text

The Times

Tuesday, Mar. 26, 1918

Sami Anders and Olivia Turner

Environmental Appendix

© Times Newspapers Limited.

JPEG scan of newsprint

English

ROOKS AND MEN.,ALLIES OF CIVIL LIFE.,(FROMI A CORESPOXDENT.),When celandines are sprinkled about the roots of the beeches, and elm crowns show red with blossom, the rooks begin to build with the decent deliberation that beseems them. Otlher birds of the wise crow tribe begin earlierthe ravens' eggs are nearly hatching by the time that the rooks' are laid-and magpies wait till April, and jays till May. But rooks in most things observe the golden mean; and merely to glance at the ripe solemnity and order which attend their nesting is to be sure that they act with reason. They nest, in fact, when a plentiful supply of writhing life in turf and clod will attend the due hatching of their young; and all birds which have a settled home tend to build earlier in the year than their wandering kin. We see the same among our domiciled garden song-thrushes, which are three weeks or a month in advance of their vagrant brothers in the fields; and rooks, in small newly-formed rookeries, or the occasional solitary pairs, are later than t}-ose of the long-established conmunities.,Most birds require at nesting-time the undisputed sporting rights over a certain estate. They will share the same territory with families of other species, but not with rivals who would trench on the same food supply for their nurseries. Rooks evade the necessity of solitude, partly by being able to gather a living from almost any tract of cultivated land, but also by an inbred civility of disposition. They consort together with humanity of intercourse. Gregarious birds never sing, for singing is with birds an expression of defiance. But rooks undoubtedly converse, if we do not use the term in an exacting sense; they prate aloud in company, and appear to feel all the better for it. What wonder if birds of such temper have occasionally been credited by the sympathetic race of men with more of our own attributes than t-hey perhaps possess ? If those pompous conclaves, that retiral in the dusky elms, do not represent an actual parliament of the rooks, or a criminal case conducted vith due forms of precedent, they may dispatch the rooks' affairs with equal advantage, and the compliment be no less sincere.,Tl'empting although it may be, and permissiblo in poetry, to depict the evening gatherings of the rooks as met to discuss the welfare of their realm,,If aught their ancient polity displease,,there is no real evidence among them of a settled j ulicial or deliberative procedure. If common action results from one of these loud dcbates, it is due not to reasoned argument or conclusive demonstration by some inky rhetorician, but to some mere gust of general impulse or the perception that it is time to go to bed. Rooks' justice is of the primitive retributive sort, and generally displays itself in a vigorous counter-attack on such unrooklike rooks as have attempted to pilfer the material of their neighbours' half-built nests. Their social sense sometimes extends so far as to impel a number of them to collective action against an offender; but there is summary justice and short shrift. In the main they are a peaceable and domestic race, and in their youth playful withal. Young rooks are scarcer pets than young ravens or magpies, but hardly less intelligent and amusing. They lack th~e bare white patch at the base of the bill which distinguishes the adult rook, and are whiskered, lik e the carrion crow.,ATTActiE5IEr TO AEICtuLTURE.,Crows are flesh-feeders, like ravens; but rooks are mote vegetarian in their diet, and much more closely attached to agriculturo. Broadly speaking, their vegetarianism is from our partial human standpoint a vice; for as vegetarians they consume seed corn and potatoes, but as flesh-feeders they destroy wireworm and other pests of the crops. It is often a delicate matter to strike a balance between the services of rooks in eating other pests and their misdeeds as posts themselves; and they stand on the border-line of the farmers' friends and enemies, though in the main on the right side. Excess of numbers over the available supply of unobjectionable food is the usual cause of their joining the enemy; and spring droughts, which seal the soil against the-r probing bills, also force them to a less discriminating and more crow-like diet. On the whole, they are sufficiently virtuous in the absence of temptation; and if that seems not much to say on behalf of birds so respectable of mien, we should remember that it may not be clear to a rook whether we cultivate our land for the sake of producing wheat or wireworms.,Rooks are earTy risers, and late in going to roost. By the time that most people see them at this tirne of year they are busy about their nests in the tree-tops, or soberly pacing the arable fields for their worms, or their wheat. But they still spend the night in their roosts in the thicker and deeper woeds where they found shelter through winter. These roosts, which they often share with jackdaws, are usually more secluded than the rookeries where they nest; and it is due to the rooks' ,intelligence that they abandon, as a rule, at nesting-time these haunts proper to wilder and shyer birds, and rear their young in the neighbourhood of men. The earliest object of the rooks in leaving their woodland haunts was probably to gain easy access to cultivated land in times when the proportion of forest to tillage was far greater. Soon they learnt that human society gives comparative protection frorn birds of prey, and took shelter, so to speak, under man's wing. Before sunrise on these March mornings, when the east is smeared with smoky light, the rooks wake with many cawings in their silvan roost, and fare [forth, before the valleys are fully awake, to their business among the haunts of men.

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