rising clear of the trees in a ragged pack, out over the river and the broad valley for the sheer glory, for the wild giving of it, as though it has been sent specially for them.
From my study window I watch black rags, like small yachts, tossing on a tumultuous sea. They lift vertically, towering in a whirling tangle of wings, only to fall again in a joyous tumble of free-fall, gyrating, rolling and sweeping up to do it all over again. No one can convince me it isn’t fun – more than fun: it’s a delight longed for after days of dreary doldrums. They are school-kids let out into the playground after a tedious lesson; racehorses led prancing to the field gate and released into spring pasture after days in a stable, heels to the sky. They fly with all the carefree abandon of a sheet of newspaper picked up and hurled willy-nilly along an empty beach on a stormy day.
The consequence of loving rooks is that I have come to care for their well-being. (Jackdaws and ravens too but, I have to confess, not so heartily the malevolent villains of the black pack, carrion or hoodie crows – ‘Crow, feeling his brain slip,/Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder’, Ted Hughes). When the crofters’ arable crops in the little river fields of this strath began to decline in the 1970s – no more oats, turnips and potatoes lovingly planted, tended and harvested by bent backs and weathered hands, stoically buttressed by universal little grey Ferguson tractors – I worried that the rooks would suffer and leave. But they clung on. The sheep and cattle fields still delivered up a harvest of grubs and worms, bugs and beetles sufficient to stave off the rooks’ departure.
I did notice that they spent more time away in winter, away on the wide arable fields of the Black Isle, stocking up on corn and barley shoots, gleaning energy enough to be back in February for nesting and raising a brood. The world around them constantly changes at the hand of man, sometimes beneficent, sometimes profoundly taxing, but rooks are resilient and supremely intelligent birds: quickly they learn to adapt to man’s latest agricultural whim and, as a happy consequence, the Aigas rooks are with us yet.
Then there is the wonderful cacophony of rooks. Their vocabulary is so expressive and varied. It certainly isn’t restricted to the rasping ‘caw’ so often dumped on them, although, of course, in a flock they can be world champions of the cawing cause when they need to be.
From my bath on a spring day, with the window flung wide, I can phoneticise at least fifteen calls. (I often wonder how many naturalists habitually keep binoculars in the bathroom and can indulge their interest from the comfort of the bath – not, as Lucy was quick to point out, the most arresting image.)
The commonest is the benchmark ‘caw’, but which I prefer to present as ‘kaarr’ or ‘aarrr’ with a flourish of canine growl at the end that is absent from ‘caw’. A bird with an urgent message to impart repeats this over and over again, with a forward thrust of the head and open bill, wings akimbo, the whole body jetting the sound forward with a counter-balancing upward flick of the fanned tail to send it on its way.
Then comes a collection of similar but quite distinctive calls of similar tonal quality, but with differing consonantal emphasis: a short, sharp ‘kork’ or ‘dark’ and a stretched ‘daaark’, a muted ‘graap’, an even quieter ‘grup’ and still softer ‘brup’, uttered as an afterthought or an aside to some louder exclamation. But these would all appear to be communication calls tossed into the broader clamour of the rook din – the rook cocktail party – as opposed to more intimate exchanges taking place between nesting partners, to chicks or near neighbours.
These more conversational utterances call for a gentler tonal approach altogether, and a much wider choice of pitch. ‘Rirrp’, ‘trip’, ‘braa’, a high-pitched ‘creek’ and the disyllabic ‘err-chup’ and an ‘err-eek’ exclamation can emerge from the same rook within the same conversation. Then there is a sharp, wholly un-rook-like click or clunk, such as you might make with your tongue on the roof of your mouth, often repeated over and over again. All this is often accompanied by a low, drawn-out ‘er-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-k’, a sound better suited to a tropical jungle than a Highland glen, uttered from somewhere gullet-glottal, somewhere in the depths of the corvid syrinx, very easy to imitate by drawing your breath slowly into your chest across your vocal cords, an irritating sound I delighted in making as a small child in the full knowledge that it would annoy adults. Rooks can keep this up for several seconds at a time, often eliciting astonishment from friends and visitors: ‘What on earth is making that noise?’
To me, to someone who loves rooks, these sounds are interesting and reassuring, but the overall generality of rook music (yes, I find them musical), when the rookery is in full nesting swing, when the fifty or sixty birds are constantly on the move, bickering and haggling, like Arab traders in a bazaar, crying as loudly as they can, thrilling the air with a living resonance, is as evocative and emotive a natural presence as the slow thunder of breakers on a shingle shore or the muffled silence of Christmas snow.
Just now our rookery has twenty-nine nests. Years ago, when gentle crofting agriculture in the glen delivered its beneficial nutrients to all manner of wildlife (we had lapwings, curlews, corncrakes, grey partridges and corn buntings here, all now long gone), the Aigas rookery rose as high as thirty-eight, but the gradual arable abandonment has taken its toll and twenty-nine now seems to be the most they can manage.
They are big nests, each one the size of a pumpkin jammed into a high fork. They are often very close, occasionally touching each other, the spread apparently governed by the availability of suitable forks rather than any other territorial imperative. They occupy five big sycamores in one cluster and two fine old English oaks, and then an outlying nest in the lime tree I view from my bath, a hundred and sixty yards as the rook flies, off to the west. This last is recent, only a few years old, whereas the others are decades established, repaired and rebuilt year after year in the same places.
At first I thought the new nest (claimed as ‘my pair’) was a welcome expansion, but extending my daily bath time (to Lucy’s irritation – ‘What are you doing in there?’) just to spy, I became concerned. There are plenty of big trees to expand into alongside the main rookery, so why, I wondered, was this pair building so far away? Slowly I came to realise that something else was going on. The two birds responsible, clearly a pair-bonded item, seemed to be outcasts from the main colony. And there was mischief afoot – more than mischief.
Right from the first day that they started to build a nest they were being mobbed by gangs from the main flock. Rowdy threes and fours would fly across at regular intervals to harry them. Initially they surrounded the incipient nest and harangued its builders with aggressively raucous cries, hopping from branch to branch, occasionally diving in and clashing with the builders. Then, when each of my pair flew off to gather sticks, one or more of the gang would follow and mob the poor bird, often causing it to drop its twig. Meanwhile, if they left the nest unattended even for a minute, others of the gang would nip in and dismantle it, skimming back to the main rookery with stolen twigs in their bills.
I watched this going on for days (‘Do hurry up and get out of the bath, John’), slowing the nest-building process right down – two twigs forward, one twig back – but never quite defeating my poor outcasts. Long after all the other nests were complete and most of the hens were incubating, my valiant pair was still patching and repairing, still suffering raids from occasional mobsters, until finally the bullies had too many domestic duties of their own to bother. Only then was my pair able to lay eggs and settle to some quieter level of conjugal privacy and isolation.
It was also an interesting observation of human behaviour to note that when rook domesticity finally won through, Lucy began to take much more interest in the whole drawn-out affair. Our morning bath sessions became punctuated with ‘What are they doing now? Have they managed to lay eggs yet? Do you think the chicks have hatched? Oh, I do hope those beastly bullies will keep away.’
They did somehow manage to rear two young, and a year later a second nest was built beside
