ROOK 179 



of the superabundant young tenants of the rookeries 

 is neither more nor less than a duty which falls 

 annually upon the shoulders of those having these 

 nesting colonies upon their property. Few would wish 

 to see the rooks thinned down to the point of 

 extermination, far from it. A note of desolation 

 would indeed be struck the moment that Merrie 

 England was divested of its rooks and rookeries. 

 Without a rookery dotted here and there throughout the 

 land our country generally would lack much of its 

 homelike character, whilst all would miss that gladden- 

 ing sound of returning spring, the cawing of the rooks in 

 the old trees around the village church and country 

 house. Still, in the interests of both sport and 

 agriculture, rook-shooting is a duty not to be lightly 

 disregarded. Some gamekeepers would root out 

 altogether the rooks from the land, they averring that, 

 of all winged creatures, the rook is the worst enemy of 

 all to both eggs and young of partridge and pheasant. 

 This, of course, is an exaggerated view to take, and 

 probably no proprietor would consent to his keeper 

 going to this extreme. One cannot, however, wonder 

 that such extreme views do occasionally find expression, 

 seeing how highly exasperated are some keepers by 

 reason of the devastation to their charges wrought by 

 the rooks. As, for instance, in the case of the head- 

 keeper of a well-known estate in an eastern county, 

 who reported that in 1897 rooks destroyed, in one night 

 only, forty-eight turkeys' eggs, from birds laying in the 

 woods; in the same nesting season these pilferers also 

 abstracted a large number of pheasants' eggs. In the 

 following spring rooks took from this same estate no less 

 than five hundred pheasants' eggs in the short space of a 



