36 THE CROW FAMILY 



case of the American crows already described, they may be seen either 

 resting on the ground or in the trees in noisy multitudes, awaiting 

 the arrival of the later flocks, or else wheeling round in the air, where 

 they " sport and dive in a playful manner, all the while exerting their 

 voices, and making a loud cawing, which being blended and softened 

 by the distance . . ., becomes a confused noise or chiding, or rather 

 a pleasing murmur, very engaging to the imagination, and not unlike 

 the cry of a pack of hounds in hollow, echoing woods, or the rushing 

 of wind in tall trees, or the tumbling of the tide upon a pebbly 

 shore." Rooks, indeed, though boasting no song in a musical sense, 

 have an even wider range of notes than the raven. They have been 

 credited with some thirty to forty different notes. 1 



Before sunset, at a given moment, the black hosts, moved by 

 what seems a common impulse, rise, and one after another go forward 

 to the roost. Sometimes they drop into it from a height, "a living 

 storm-cloud discharging its black-winged rain," each separate bird 

 shooting and whizzing down to the trees with occasional tumblings 

 in mid-air. Another time, after circling and eddying a while over- 

 head, with joyful clamour, they will descend sedately, and rise and 

 sink once more ; or again, for there is an infinite variety in this 

 evening ritual, they may swoop in without a sound, then, as if panic- 

 stricken by some hideous vision in the deepening shadows, burst 

 out like an embodied thunder-clap, only to swoop in, then out, then in 

 till the spectre has been laid, and they stop. At times a kind of 

 madness seems to grip them. After a tempest of sound, the black 

 rout will hurl itself right in among the trees, shooting between them 

 with miraculous turns and twists, hurtling over and about them, and 

 in and out a fast, frenzied, rapturous dance, with the pine aisles 

 for ball-room, dimly lighted by the moon, and, it may be, the snow, 

 across which the dusky shapes flash and vanish to the rushing music 

 of the swift strong wings. 



1 Gilbert White, Selborne, Letter lix. For a list of the notes of the rook, see E. Selous, 

 Bird Watching, p. 299. 



