WRONG ROOKS

I think I know why Jamie Tusting’s rook pie was less than appetising — he used the wrong rooks.

The long history of rook pie in mid-may is a means of exploiting a new meat source at what was once a hungry time of year.

The newly fledged branchers, standing precariously alongside their nests, would have been harvestable with slingshots and catapults in the days before firearms, whereas the adult rooks that Jamie ambushed would have been nigh on impossible. Today, an air rifle is the perfect tool for shooting branchers.

These days, making a rook pie would not be a valid reason for shooting branchers under the terms of the general licences, but if you have an agricultural or conservation reason to thin out a rookery, eating the spoils is perfectly legal. Having done a comparative tasting of pies made to the same recipe using woodpigeon and branchers, I can tell you that there is very little difference, except that being all young birds, the rooks were more tender.

On the other hand, I have no doubt that grown-up rooks, after a year or more of feeding