130 THE COMMON ROOK. 



periods of festivity also. When the waters retire from 

 meadows and low lands, where they have remained any 

 time, a luxurious banquet is provided for this corvus, 

 in the multitude of worms which it finds drowned on 

 them. But its jubilee is the season of the cockchaffer 

 (melolantha vulgaris), when every little copse, every 

 oak, becomes animated with it and all its noisy, joyful 

 family feeding and scrambling for the insect food. The 

 power or faculty, be it by the scent, or by other means, 

 that rooks possess of discovering their food, is very 

 remarkable. I have often observed them alight on a 

 pasture of uniform verdure, and exhibiting no sensible 

 appearance of withering or decay, and immediately 

 commence stocking up the ground. Upon investigating 

 the object of their operations, I have found many heads 

 of plantains, the little autumnal dandelions, and other 

 plants, drawn out of the ground and scattered about, 

 their roots having been eaten off by a grub, leaving 

 only a crown of leaves upon the surface. This grub 

 beneath, in the earth, the rooks had detected in their 

 flight, and descended to feed on it, first pulling up the 

 plant which concealed it, and then drawing the larvae from 

 their holes. By what intimation this bird had discovered 

 its hidden food we are at a loss to conjecture ; but the 

 rook has always beei^ supposed to scent matters with 

 great discrimination. 



It is but simple justice to these often censured birds, 

 to mention the service that they at times perform for us 

 in our pasture lands. There is no plant that I endeavor 

 to root out with more persistency in these places than 

 the turfy hair-grass (aira csespitosa). It abounds in all 

 the colder parts of our grass lands, increasing greatly 

 when undisturbed, and, worthless itself, overpowers its 

 more valuable neighbors. The larger turfs we pretty 

 well get rid of; but multitudes of small roots are so 

 interwoven with the pasture herbage, that we cannot 

 separate them without injury ; and these our persever- 

 ing rooks stock up for us in such quantities, that in 

 some seasons the fields are strewed with the eradicated 

 plants. The whole so torn up does not exclusively 

 prove to be the hair-grass, but infinitely the larger 



