380 BIRD LIFE AT BINGHAJVTS MELCOMBE 



danger. They held a council of war in the old 

 home, rose from it in dense clouds, circled high 

 in air round their more callous or short-sighted 

 descendants, cawed their loudest, and then fell, with 

 one consent, on the threatened nests. Within three 

 or four hours, they had destroyed them completely 

 and carried all the sticks away. It is some seven 

 years since this happened, and they have never 

 attempted to refound a colony in so uncanny a 

 spot. 



What is it, we may well ask, which, in spite of 

 their intense hereditary attachment to a particular 

 locality, a particular group of trees, and even a 

 particular tree in a group, will sometimes lead a 

 whole rookery, without a moment's warning, 

 without any apparent cause, and under the most 

 strange and cruelly unnatural circumstances, to 

 desert, in a body, their nests and eggs, nay, even 

 their callow or half-fledged young, leaving them to 

 die of starvation ? What indeed ? But that such 

 things do happen, on occasion, is certain. In 1847, 

 for instance, a large rookery, in the Palace Garden, 

 in the city of Norwich, was suddenly deserted by 

 its inmates, in the middle of the breeding season. 

 Last year, 1903, the rooks in the rookery of the 

 Grange, Lord Ashburton's house near Alresford, 



