but they were to suffer the same treatment to such an outlandish degree that after a while they gave up and disappeared. A Mafia mob from the main rookery quickly stole all their sticks, dismantled the whole assemblage so that the nest vanished altogether, a thuggish gang retribution as if they had refused to pay their protection dues. This quite upset the normally placid Lucy, whose verdict was immediate and damning: ‘Those bullies deserve to be shot.’
This outcast/outlier nest phenomenon is not unknown. It’s well documented in the literature, although it seems to be shrouded in myth and folklore. One plausible explanation is that rooks are so obsessively gregarious that they won’t allow new nests unless they are very close by. This is all very well, but it doesn’t explain why the outcasts should be outcasts in the first place. One frequently cited report claims that following the destruction of an outlier nest the outcast pair were then subjected to a ‘rook court’ where the elders of the colony sat round in a ring in a field and appeared to be admonishing the demoralised pair in the middle. Hmm, well, I think that may be one for Old Malkie.
Admonished outcasts or not, my pair won. They hung on and raised their brood and to this day the nest is intact, a handsome black blob high in the lime, and I can still lie in my bath and watch them hubbub-ing about their urgent affairs. Whether or not they are now accepted members of the main rookery is unclear. They still draw attention from the mob, but far less aggressively, and for the present the nest remains perhaps not virgo, but certainly intacta.
* * *
Before I depart the colourful world of rooks (for now – their story is far from over), I have one more tale to tell. In the 1950s, when I was twelve years old and at a Somerset boarding school, I rescued a fledgling rook that had been storm-gusted from the nest before it could fly. I don’t think it was badly hurt, but it sat huddled in the long grass at the foot of a large elm, crying wheezily to its parents high above who probably hadn’t noticed one of their brood missing.
I was thrilled. By the age of twelve I had raised (not always successfully) many orphans: squirrels, rabbits, hedgehogs, a whole brood of greenfinches after their mother was snatched by a sparrowhawk, even a fox cub. I caught the genderless rooklet in my hands and carried it home rejoicing. I gave it a suitably sexless name – Squawky. For the rest of that summer term, my last at the school, I was the envy of many boys, who vainly searched the drive avenue of elms for Squawkys of their own.
Squawky never flew and I never knew why. There was nothing broken, both wings flapped vigorously, and he knew enough about flight to use them for extended flapping lurches from perch to shoulder or head or other convenient landing. Try as I might, I never got him to do more than cross a room. Outside I thrust him up into the air in the hope of teaching him the joy of rapturous flight. He flapped raggedly to the ground twenty yards away where he landed entirely normally, then strutted about looking indignant. I took him back to the avenue to show him the wavering in-and-out flights of his own kind and to listen to their raucous chorale. He would sit on my forearm, head tilting quizzically at the wild birds high above, but with no hint of any inclination to join them. After many fruitless attempts I gave up.
He became my constant companion. During lessons he would sit outside the classroom on a windowsill peering in and occasionally tapping on the glass to attract my attention. Other boys either loved Squawky and followed me enviously about, begging me to let them ‘have a go’, by which they meant let him sit on their shoulder for a while, or they jealously resented the attention I garnered and sniped at me with snide remarks like ‘Serves you right if he craps on your essay.’ Even the headmaster revealed tolerant sufferance in his mild but humourless sarcasm, ‘Lister-Kaye seems to know nothing about arithmetic but everything about crows.’
At the end of term, and to my utter desolation, on the illogical pretext that because I was moving on to another boarding school I couldn’t look after a pet rook, I was not allowed to take Squawky home. A friendly domestic lady called Ruby, who worked in the school kitchens and who for many weeks had offered a clandestine supply of left-over scraps for Squawky, came to my rescue. A gem she truly was. She took pity on me or the rook, or both, and offered to have him. Her farm labourer husband agreed to build an aviary onto their cottage in the village nearby. With a heavy but grateful heart, I delivered the rook into it on my last day.
Life moves on. I have to confess that I never gave Squawky much thought again until one day twenty-two years later I happened to be driving past that Somerset village (the prep school had long since closed) and turned down its only street, trying to remember where precisely Squawky had been housed. I recognised the cottage straight away, unmissable for the spacious wire-netting aviary attached to its gable end. I parked the car and walked up the garden path. To my utter astonishment, I was met by rasping cries from a ragged-looking and extremely ancient rook with an almost bald head. It was Squawky.
He was certainly not beautiful. His naturally featherless cheeks had developed the leathery baldness of a welding glove, a mark of age all rooks over three produce as an adaptive response to habitually piercing the damp soil with their dagger bills in search of leatherjacket grubs. The soiled feathers around the bill simply give up and fail to grow; in the same way some vultures and storks are bald for endlessly thrusting their heads inside rotting carcasses. At nearly twenty-three Squawky’s cheeks were huge and as muddy white as a mushroom, made more sinister by the almost total absence of black feathers on his domed skull. He looked like a bad caricature of a vulture with a straight bill or a stork with a short one. But most comical of all were his pantaloons. His feathery trousers, reaching well below his black-scaly knees, were a cross between gamekeepers’ plus-fours and the 1930s tennis shorts worn by Indian army colonels.
The kind farm-labourer husband was long departed to build celestial aviaries, and Squawky and the widow Ruby, his almost-stone-deaf, now-in-her-eighties mistress, had lived on in happy andro-corvid companionship for many years. I spent a rapt and nostalgic hour shouting to her so loudly that Squawky, several yards away outside, became agitated and excitedly joined in most of the conversation. Her hearing can’t have been so bad because at one point I made the forgivable slip of calling the bird ‘my rook’. As quick as a flash the old lady leaned forward and corrected me: ‘No, dearie, my rook.’
I fed Squawky some porridge and scrambled egg – his favourite dish of more than two decades lovingly prepared by Ruby, which he gobbled noisily and with great vigour, swiping his bill clean on the edge of the bowl when he’d finished. I departed still not quite believing that rooks could live so long.
* * *
My enthusiasm for rooks has digressed me from what was so extraordinary in November. They should not have been nest-building at all. I didn’t know it at the time, but something was upsetting the biorhythms that govern the lives of most of our wildlife, whether visible from my bath or not. The rooks were confused. At first I thought it might be the length of daylight that baffled them, imagining that early November had the same length of day at our latitude as their normal nesting time in February, but I was wrong. There is more than an hour and a half’s difference – far too broad a wedge to disorientate an intelligent bird like a rook.
Could the temperature have been the same, triggering some deep genetic impulse to build nests? But, no, the mean temperatures for early November and late February were more than 4º Celsius apart for the previous year. So what had done it? What had brought them to my bathroom window, to dance and haggle through the un-leafing tree tops, to soar and plunge and cry among the striping rays of the lowering sun? Just what else was going on?
5
Prints in the Snow
What freezings I have felt, what dark days seen,
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
‘Sonnet 97’, William
