282 The Field Naturalist's Quarterly Nov. 



There is one more attribute of the Raven, he is an early 



riser, and for this Shakspear gives him credit (" Cymbehne," 



ii. 2) : — 



" That dawning may bare the raven's eye." 



With this I pass to Crows and Rooks — Corvti-s corone, the 

 Carrion Crow ; Corviis comix, the Hooded Crow ; Corvus 

 frugilegus, the Rook. There are those who would put the 

 Rook into a different category, but I follow Gould. 



The most interesting allusion in Shakspear is in " Mac- 

 beth " (iii. 3), where he is meditating the murder of Banquo. 



He says — 



" Light thickens, and the crow 

 Makes wing to the rooky wood." 



I am quite sure that Halliwell's interpretation is right. In 

 his archaic dictionary he says, " Rooky, roaky ; hazy, misty " 

 (Lincolnshire). It occurs twice in this sense in an old book, 

 " Roky, misty, nebulosus." " Mysty or rooky as the eyre " ; 

 and he gives other quotations in support of it, mentioning 

 this passage in particular. The word is now purely East 

 Anglian. I remember many years ago in Suffolk an old 

 man who described to me what happened in early spring 

 by, '' It snew, and it blew, and it thew, and then came a 

 great roak" (my spelling is phonetic). Seeing that the 

 word rooky is especially Lincolnshire, it is odd that Tenny- 

 son, evidently drawing on the lines of Shakspear, should 

 have said in " Locksley Hall " — 



"The many-wintered crow 

 That leads the clanging rookery home." 



Some naturalists have been very much shocked by these 

 lines, saying that he should have known better than to 

 confuse the pious Rook and the unconscionable Crow. But 

 the two classes do mix. Both Bewicke and Charles Dixon 

 say of the Hooded Crow that it is more gregarious than 

 its confrere the Carrion Crow, and when inland mixes freely 

 with the Rook, while Hudson goes still farther and says of 

 the Carrion Crow, " When not engaged in breeding the 

 crow is to some extent gregarious, and is also social, asso- 

 ciating both in the fields and at roosting-time with rooks 

 and jackdaws. And it is probable that this habit may even 



