REALM OF THE ROOK
Raucous tree-top colonies of rooks spark the new season into life and bring cheer to farmer and walker. Tim Dee explores our long, amiable relationship with these surprisingly clever birds
Raucous rookeries herald the beginning of spring. Tim Dee explores our relationship with these clever crows.
In the early spring of 1913, Edward Thomas cycled from London to the Quantock hills in Somerset on a commission to write a book. A few days pedalling west looking for the spring was his subject; what he saw was to be his material. In Pursuit of Spring appeared the following year.
There were false starts and diversions (books are like that, and spring can be, too) but the season was found, sure enough. There is no single definition of spring, of course, and Thomas checked off many candidates. One, though, was so familiar he barely noticed it. Before he’d even left the outskirts of the capital he had reached his goal. In the treetops, every mile or so along the roadside, in noisy flapping gatherings, big black birds were at work on their twiggy black nests. As Thomas cycled past he counted these rookeries. Apart from noting where they were, he wrote little more about them, yet nothing else on his journey announced so emphatically that spring had arrived.
As signifiers of the season, rooks are still hard to beat. They fly like black flags over the greening world. In March, no other wildlife seems so busily to be getting on with its year as rooks in their rookeries. No other nest sites are so obvious or so readily identified. And thankfully, in the era of the great thinning of nature, rooks and rookeries remain common enough across lowland Britain.
I followed in Edward Thomas’s tracks from London to Somerset two years ago, and counted 60 rookeries with about 2,000 nests overall. My count easily matched Thomas’ total. In 1913, elms were the birds’ preferred accommodation. In 2017, beeches, poplars and oaks were in use, since the elms have all but disappeared. One beech-wood city of the birds seen on Salisbury Plain massed so blackly and cacophonously that I missed hearing the dinosaur rumble of an army tank bearing down towards me on its manoeuvres.
The birds predate any military hardware. Many rookeries are more than 100 years old. Some sites have been occupied for far longer. The rooks at Bottisham near Cambridge were studied in the mid-19th century by clericnaturalist Leonard Jenyns (who turned down the position of naturalist aboard HMS Beagle, allowing Charles Darwin to take his place). The elms they used have gone, but every time I pass by from my nearby home, I see the rooks there still (in beeches now) and think of them having a local history – generation after generation – as long as any human inhabitants of the area.
Rooks look down on us in various ways. They prefer to nest high up. Often from where they perch they can see the next rookery miles away – a black-feathered armada rides the sky over our heads. But they are homemakers, too. They are loyal to their trees and like to reuse their nests. Repairs begin in the winter and new decks are laid on narrow branches. Sticks are often filched from other nests. And they