70 THE ROOK 
tion for the crop, they repeat their visits, spreading more widely 
over the field, and not only pick up the grubs which lie on the sur- 
face, but bore for such as, by certain signs best known to themselves, 
lie concealed. I need not say that in all these stages the wisdom 
of the farmer is to offer them every inducement to remain ; all that 
they ask is to be let alone. Not so, however, when the seed-crop 
is sown. Grain, pulse, and potatoes are favourite articles of diet 
with them, and they will not fail to attack these as vigorously as they 
did the grubs a few days before. They are therefore undeniably 
destructive at this season, and all available means should be adopted 
to deter them from alighting on cultivated ground. About the 
second week in March they desert the winter roosting places, to which 
they had nightly congregated in enormous flocks, leave off their 
wandering habits, and repair as if by common consent to their 
old breeding places. Here, with much cawing and bustling, they 
survey the ruins of their old nests, or select sites for new ones, 
being guided by their instinct to avoid all those trees the upper 
branches of which are too brittle for their purpose either because 
the trees are sickly or in an incipient state of decay. Hence, when 
it has occasionally happened that a nestless tree in a rookery has 
been blown down, the birds have been saluted as prophets, while 
in reality the tree yielded to the blast before its fellows because 
it was unsound, the Rooks knowing nothing about the matter 
except that signs of decay had set in among the upper twigs while 
as yet all seemed solid beneath. How the birds squabble about 
their nests, how they punish those thievishly disposed, how they 
drive away intruders from strange rookeries, how scrupulously they 
avoid, during building, to pick up a stick that has chanced to drop, 
how the male bird during incubation feeds his mate with the most 
luscious grubs brought home in the baggy pouch at the base of 
his bill, how every time that a bird caws while perched he strains 
his whole body forward and expands his wings with the effort, all 
these things, and many more, I must pass over without further 
notice, leaving them to be verified by the reader with the help of 
a good field-glass. I must, however, mention, in passing, the 
custom so generally adopted by sportsmen, of shooting the 
young birds as soon as they are sufficiently fledged to climb 
from their nests to the adjoining twigs, or to perform their 
first tentative flight over the summits of the trees. It is 
supposed to be necessary to keep down their numbers, but this 
is a disputed point. I have, however, little doubt that Rooks 
during the whole of their lives associate the memory of these 
battues with the appearance of a man armed with a gun. Many 
people believe that Rooks know the smell of powder: they have 
good reason to know it; but that they are as much alarmed at 
the sight of a stick as a gun in the hand of a man, may be proved 
by any one who, chancing to pass near a flock feeding on the 
