early November our rooks arrived back at their long-established nests in the tall limes, oaks and sycamores that line the Aigas drive. You couldn’t miss them. They were their usual boisterous personalities, like inner-city youths: racketing, arguing, bossing, coming and going, flapping, cawing loudly and generally carrying on like – well, like rooks always will. They were nesting – at least, they were going through the unmistakable motions of nesting. They were paired off, gathering and stealing each other’s sticks, repairing old nests and even building from scratch. But it was only just November. Now that was unusual. We don’t expect the rooks to attend their nests until February, sometimes late February, if the weather is hard. But November?
It didn’t last. In ten days they were gone again, flocking away in rowdy gangs tangled with jackdaws, down to the potato and stubble fields recently harvested, the arable soils of the Beauly Firth as dark and rich as molasses, where they joined up with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others from far and wide. I never did discover why they had arrived back at their rookery so unexpectedly, so absurdly early. It was as though they were feeling some collective corvid memory lapse and a need to check it all out, just to make sure they were still welcome there, like old boys and girls heading back to school for nostalgia’s sake. I logged it away as odd and, as the New Testament has it, ‘pondered these things in my heart’.
With hindsight I now know that something other was indeed up, although it took a long time to become clear to me. At a human level we tend to view and assess climate change by large events, not small ones. Hurricanes, cyclones, storms and cloudbursts, rampaging floods and withering droughts are the dramatic yardsticks by which we measure swerves away from expected ‘normal’ patterns of weather. It’s hardly surprising: they come rampaging in and imperil us with their power and potential for disaster – or far worse. But in reality they are probably just the crescendos in the overture, the pushy high points of much more subtle shifts and pulses that are happening, pianissimo, all the time, most of which go unnoticed or at best recorded only by meteorological boffins with their noses pressed to electro- barographs and computer models.
In just a few weeks we would know that whatever undetected signal had triggered the rooks’ unseasonal return to their nests was indeed part of some much grander orchestration, something much more all-encompassing, much more . . . yes, perhaps ‘sinister’ is the right word, after all.
* * *
Not just God, but I also love rooks: Corvus frugilegus, the very fittingly named ‘foraging crow’. The onomatopoeic crow – hrōc in Old English, rork in Old Dutch, craa in Old Scots, all, including the word ‘crow’ itself, inflections of the distinctive kraa calls everyone immediately recognises. I love them for their dissonant, rough-edged, pub-brawl rowdiness, all of which, as one of my earliest childhood memories, is permanently etched into my cerebral cortex.
I need to come out and declare this now because so many people seem not to like rooks, lumping them together with every other crow and often refusing to acknowledge the many differences – although getting it off my chest feels a bit like owning up to some contemptible vice. Farmers grind their teeth and spit venom when packs of rooks swoop down, like brigands, to raid their winter barley fields, ripping the germinating seeds and the stash of protein-rich sprouts from the rain-sodden tilth, just like the old Scottish Border reivers, ‘. . . where all men take their prey’.
In a fit of rage a farmer near here felled a handsome spinney of mature Scots pines just to prevent the rooks nesting there, and another, also given to uncontrollable outbursts of anger against many aspects of the natural world, attempted to sue his peace-and-wildlife-loving neighbours for having the temerity to harbour a rookery in their trees. Even those who don’t suffer loss of any kind further darken the rooks’ iridescent blackness by ignorantly dismissing them as just ‘crows’, uttered with a sneer and all the disdain one might award to football hooligans or drug dealers; an ornithological unfairness equivalent to lumping swans together with geese or writing off fieldfares and redwings as just thrushes. In fact, of course, the crow family is famously diverse, even the black or nearly black ones on the British list: rooks, jackdaws, choughs, carrion crows and ravens differ widely in character, habits, appearance, diet and their manifold interactions with people. It is hard to argue that crows bring many obvious or tangible benefits to mankind, but then neither do most other bird species unless we gain pleasure from their songs, their colourful displays or from killing and eating them, little or none of which relate to crows. Rightly or wrongly, the crow family have long been cast in the villain role and little I can say will alter that.
But, for me, rooks are different. I love everything about rooks and I have clung to the emotive authority of their cries since infancy, when I knew no birds by name and saw them only as flickering glimpses in the great whispering beech trees through the bedroom window of my childhood home. So I am proud to have a rookery at Aigas. I get personal and possessive about them when they return from their winter forays to nest in my trees and surround our lives with their remarkably human and often comical racketing.
The Aigas rookery is very old. We know from the first-hand testament of an old lady (Helen Foucar, now long deceased), who spent her childhood holidays here more than a hundred years ago with guardian godparents, who in their turn had been here since the 1860s, that every May back then the young birds were shot at the point of fledging, as they perched on the edge of their nests, by local Highlanders, the estate workers whose perquisite it was to harvest and consume this seasonal bounty. But our rookery is probably much older than she or her guardians knew. (Although the rhyme is thought to allude to Henry VIII’s sacking of England’s monasteries during the Reformation, the ‘Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’ might well have been rooks: they were commonly eaten by country folk right into the second half of the twentieth century.)
This centuries-inhabited house sits in a wider landscape largely denuded of its trees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by a population of Highland people perpetually teetering on the precipice of a failed harvest and famine. All trees had a price not so much on their lofty crowns as on their hearty bowls and stalwart limbs, for structural timber, furniture or firewood, for charcoal or just ready cash, anything to stave off the crushing poverty of what we would now consider to be a third-world existence barely compatible with civilisation. Only when the majority of Highlanders upped and left for southern cities and the New World in the nineteenth century (more than eight thousand left from this narrow glen, Strathglass, a diaspora extending well into the twentieth century) did the trees return either by planting or by nature’s unsleeping opportunism. Ours are the legacy of that era: mature oaks, limes, sycamores and one or two big ashes, along with the naturally regenerated native birches, Scots pines, goat willows, hazels, rowans and geans (wild cherries).
Every spring I look forward to the rooks’ return to the rookery, to the soap opera of their constant bickering, sabotaging and thieving from their neighbours’ nests. One large and now well-established nest high in the swaying tops of a mature lime tree is in full view from our bathroom window. I can lie in the bath and watch the daily machinations of their competitive, gangland twig war, drink in the rough old music of their calling, ponder the urgent electricity of instinct blending with guile drawn from the hard-edged experience of survival, the ultimate judgement of all living things. But it is from their flight that I draw the greatest delight.
When a wild wind comes calling, hustling in from the south-west like an uninvited guest, its warm, wet embrace rises and falls, wuthering down the mountains and whirling through the crowns of our tallest trees, building zest and power, so often the precursor to short, stinging rain squalls. My eyes immediately avert to the clouds, to the roiling snowy-grey constants that are such dependable tokens of our time and our place in nature. Their ever-changing back-cloth seems to complement the drama of the rooks’ flight, bringing vibrant focus to their ragged black shapes and awarding purpose to their swirling patterns. More vividly than any television forecast or smart-phone app, the clouds and the rooks speak to me about the day ahead.
They seem to
