79 THE ROOK 



tion for the crop, they repeat their visits, spreading more widely 

 over the field, and not only pick up the grubs which lie on the sur- 

 face, but bore for such as, by certain signs best known to themselves, 

 lie concealed. I need not say that in all these stages the wisdom 

 of the farmer is to offer them every inducement to remain ; all that 

 they ask is to be let alone. Not so, however, when the seed-crop 

 is sown. Grain, pulse, and potatoes are favourite articles of diet 

 with them, and they will not fail to attack these as vigorously as they 

 did the grubs a few days before. They are therefore undeniably 

 destructive at this season, and all available means should be adopted 

 to deter them from alighting on cultivated ground. About the 

 second week in March they desert the winter roosting places, to which 

 they had nightly congregated in enormous flocks, leave off their 

 wandering habits, and repair as if by common consent to their 

 old breeding places. Here, with much cawing and bustling, they 

 survey the ruins of their old nests, or select sites for new ones, 

 being guided by their instinct to avoid all those trees the upper 

 branches of which are too brittle for their purpose either because 

 the trees are sickly or in an incipient state of decay. Hence, when 

 it has occasionally happened that a nestless tree in a rookery has 

 been blown down, the birds have been saluted as prophets, while 

 in reality the tree yielded to the blast before its fellows because 

 it was unsound, the Rooks knowing nothing about the matter 

 except that signs of decay had set in among the upper twigs while 

 as yet all seemed solid beneath. How the birds squabble about 

 their nests, how they punish those thievishly disposed, how they 

 drive away intruders from strange rookeries, how scrupulously they 

 avoid, during building, to pick up a stick that has chanced to drop, 

 how the male bird during incubation feeds his mate with the most 

 luscious grubs brought home in the baggy pouch at the base of 

 his bill, how every time that a bird caws while perched he strains 

 his whole body forward and expands his wings with the effort, all 

 these things, and many more, I must pass over without further 

 notice, leaving them to be verified by the reader with the help of 

 a good field-glass. I must, however, mention, in passing, the 

 custom so generally adopted by sportsmen, of shooting the 

 young birds as soon as they are sufficiently fledged to climb 

 from their nests to the adjoining twigs, or to perform their 

 first tentative flight over the summits of the trees. It is 

 supposed to be necessary to keep down their numbers, but this 

 is a disputed point. I have, however, little doubt that Rooks 

 during the whole of their lives associate the memory of these 

 battues with the appearance of a man armed with a gun. Many 

 people believe that Rooks know the smell of powder : they have 

 good reason to know it ; but that they are as much alarmed at 

 the sight of a stick as a gun in the hand of a man, may be proved 

 by any one who, chancing to pass near a flock feeding on the 



