Birds by Land and Sea 



flock makes off without exception. That this is not 

 due to alarm will be readily believed by those 

 acquainted with the way of rooks. For there is a 

 decided individuality about this bird ; and if a flock 

 gets up at one's approach, a few will often refuse to 

 rise, or, even after jerking their wings preparatory 

 to flight, settle down again as if they consider it to 

 have been a "false alarm." Be that as it may, 

 those in authority among the rooks have changed 

 their sleeping quarters, and they now fly east and 

 west daily in the winter between their sleeping and 

 their nesting quarters ; and, although they dribble 

 in in the morning and dribble out again in the 

 evening, the straggling line of slowly moving black 

 wings touches a sympathetic chord as it comes up, 

 cawing from afar, to the kindling east, or as it 

 passes and fades away at evening in the reddening 

 west. 



All rooks do not daily visit their nesting haunts 

 during the winter as ours do, but some forsake 

 them when the young have flown, to return again 

 only in the following spring. It must have been 

 such a return which I witnessed on the 3rd March. 

 I was in the heart of the city of Manchester at five 

 o'clock in the afternoon of that day, and, looking 

 up, beheld at a great height, immediately over the 

 Exchange, a flock of about a couple of hundred 

 rooks flying straight on roughly a south-and-north 

 line. I hurried on, and watched them pass in high 

 flight between the Cathedral and the Exchange 



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