THE ROOKERY AT DUSK 



peewits come down on strident wing to their night 

 haunts in stubble and turnip field. At this hour 

 the pheasants are cocketting to roost, the rookery is 

 in wild unrest. An hour later no tinge of colour is 

 left of a sunset of splendour. It is quite dark ; the 

 two vast streamers of the Milky Way are on the 

 south, whilst the Swan, her bright star Deneb almost 

 of the first magnitude, is overhead in full flight 

 across the world. These are signs of the ageing of 

 summer that press home on us. Yet it seems hardly 

 weeks since we stood at the wicket at this hour and 

 looked across the lane at Capella flashing in the 

 baths of sunset thrushes singing, ghost moths 

 dancing, the air full of swallow sprights. 



Of well-known sights and sounds of Nature in 

 English village and park none perhaps touches me 

 so often as this wild unrest of the rook at the end of 

 day. It is full of contradiction familiar, mysteri- 

 ous, an uproar, a lullaby. The rook preliminaries 

 to roost in their main features resemble the strange, 

 beautiful movements of starling and linnet flocks ; 

 and in origin and meaning all these evening hymns 

 and exercises of large associations of birds are 

 probably the same. If we could tell exactly why 

 the seething starling swarm utters from the heavy- 

 weighed tree that extraordinary sing-song before 

 sleep, and why the linnets of a winter eve go through 

 spiral evolutions, we should know what moves the 

 rooks. But these plainly seen, often admired things, 

 are the arcana of wild life. We may tell how the 

 burnish on the dove's breast is effected, or that the 



195 



