VERMIN AND TRAPPING 81 



are as cheap as bicycles will the keeper be able 

 to compete with rooks at finding eggs on anything 

 like equal terms. Even then rooks would have 

 the advantage : for what they cannot see through 

 they can walk beneath easily, to say nothing of 

 a theory that rooks, like all other creatures, have 

 eyes that magnify, so that objects appear to them 

 several times larger than to the eyes of men. In 

 any case, the eyes of a rook are infinitely keener 

 than those of a man. Some rooks are worse than 

 others at stealing eggs and young game. I am 

 certain that when once a rook has tasted an egg it 

 never loses a chance of doing so again, and the 

 older it gets the more cunning it becomes at 

 finding eggs. You may be sure a rook is an 

 experienced egg -thief when you see it beating 

 along a hedge, or over a wood or a field, with 

 bill pointing this way and that, as its eyes pry 

 into everything. Evidently rooks find peewits' 

 eggs comparatively as difficult to find as do men, 

 for they are to be seen quartering a peewit-haunted 

 field only about a yard from the ground. 



To show how cunning and persevering rooks 

 become in their search for eggs, when walking 

 along a dense hedge I often have heard a flapping 

 of dusky wings within, and so have ended the 

 career of many an arch-robber of nests. This is 

 good evidence that, with all their cunning and 

 instinct of self-preservation, rooks do not reason, 



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