Rook

 

An unexpected visitor to the garden bird feeder this week: a rook. They don’t appear in the garden very often, but when they do it’s usually in early spring, when they are looking for twigs to renovate nests.

Ffty years ago, when we first came to live in this small market town in the foothills of the North Pennines, on the edge of farmland, we used to have two large rookeries close-by, but as the town has grown, with new housing around its margins, they’ve shifted their nests further away. It’s a long-term pattern of behaviour that has been well documented in many places: rooks generally do not tolerate a lot of disturbance under their rookeries.

 Peering up into a rookery on a windy spring day, at the swaying nests overhead, can be disorientating, unless you steady yourself by leaning against a tree trunk, feeling the transmitted power of the wind when the bole flexes against your back. Down below, earthbound, there is something Hitchcockian about those dark silhouettes wheeling overhead, with their broad wings, finger-like primaries and bony dagger beaks that prise insect grubs from grassroots.

The rooks ride the gusts, sometimes settling into what sounds like conversational cawing, often rising as a raucous flock for no obvious reason. A few bring twigs to repair nests, others seem to be here just to be sociable.

It seems strange to see these ungainly birds visiting the garden bird table because their pickaxe beaks seem ill-adapted for picking up sunflower and millet seeds, but they are birds with a very varied diet.

Come summer, after the harvest, when the breeding season is over, they’ll be pacing through local stubble fields, in the company jackdaws and crows, looking for wheat, barley and oat seed that the combine harvester dropped: nature’s gleaners at work.