A Plea for the Rooks. 573 



reach of weather or the attacks of other insects, or small birds, 

 whose shorter and softer bills cannot penetrate the recesses of its 

 secure retreat, buried some inches below the soil : the Rook alone 

 can do so ; if watched when seen feeding in a field of sprouting 

 wheat, the heedless observer will abuse him when he sees him 

 jerking up root after root of the rising crop ; but the careful 

 observer will, if- he examines minutely, detect in rnany of these 

 roots the cell of a wireworm, in its silent and underground 

 progress, inflicting death on stems of many future grains. Their 

 sagacity, too, in discovering that a field of wheat or a meadow 

 is suffering from the superabundance of some devouring insect 

 is deserving of notice. Whether they find it out by sight, smell, 

 or some additional unknown sense, is a mystery, but that they 

 do so is a fact beyond all contradiction.' And now as a climax I 

 come at last to the evidence of him whom I consider the first of 

 modern naturalists, Mr. Waterton,* and he says in his first book 

 of Essays, wherein he has devoted a whole chapter to the Rooks : 

 ' Now, if we bring, as a charge against them, their feeding upon 

 the industry of man, as, for example, during the time of a hard 

 frost, or at seed time, or at harvest, at which periods they will 

 commit depredations, if not narrowly watched, we ought, in 

 justice, to put down in their favour the rest of the year, when 

 they feed entirely upon insects,' and then he refers us, ' if we wish 

 to know the amount of noxious insects destroyed by Rooks,' to an 

 admirable paper on the services of the Rook, in the Magazine of 

 Natural History, -f- and concludes by saying, 'I wish every farmer 

 in England would read it ; they would then be convinced how 

 much the Rook befriends them.' But in the second series of 

 Essays J the same excellent writer is again provoked to defend his 

 sable friends by a threatened extermination of them in Scotland, 

 and he says, ' We have innumerable quantities of these birds in 

 this part of Yorkshire, and we consider them our friends ; they 

 appear in thousands upon our grass lands, and destroy myriads of 



Waterton's ' Essays in Natural History,' first series, p. 134. 



t Yol. vi., p. 142, paper by T. G. Clitheroe, Lancashire. 



J Waterton's 'Essays in Natural History/ second series, p. 169. 



