196 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
were cut down and the old house demolished, when the Rooks 
emigrated to a plantation at the back of New Street, Spring 
Gardens. 
In the gardens of Brunswick House, in the New Road, opposite 
Devonshire Place, a colony of Rooks has been established for some 
years. I find from my notes that in 1840 there were twenty nests 
in the plane trees of Brunswick House, and five in the trees over- 
hanging the New Road. In 1858 (an extraordinary mild season), 
on January 23rd, Rooks were building in the plane trees of 
Brunswick House fifteen nests. In 1876 1 counted seventeen 
nests. This year, on April 15th, fifteen nests, which now occupy 
only three of the plane trees nearest the Regent’s Park. The tree 
overhanging the New Road is untenanted, although in 1875 it 
contained a single nest. 
In some plane trees in a garden on the east side of Gower Street 
are three Rooks’ nests, and two others in a plane tree in the garden 
of No. 5, Gordon Place, Gordon Square. 
There was formerly a considerable Rookery in the Temple 
Gardens, in the elms in the King’s Bench Walk.* When they 
ceased to build there I cannot ascertain exactly. One of the 
porters tells me that he has been in the Temple, man and boy, 
between forty and fifty years, and he cannot remember any Rooks 
or nests there. In Goldsmith’s time it was a flourishing colony. 
In his ‘ Animated Nature,’ printed in 1774, he says :— 
“The Rook, as is well known, builds in woods and forests in the neigh- 
bourhood of man, and sometimes makes choice of groves in the very midst 
of cities for the place of its retreat and security: in these it establishes a 
bond of legal constitutions, by which all intruders are excluded from coming 
to live among them, and none suffered to build but acknowledged natives of 
the place. Ihave often amused myself with observing their plan of policy 
* The history of this colony is rather curious. 1t was founded in Queen Anne’s 
time by Sir Edward Northey, the well-known lawyer of that period, who colonized 
the place with birds from his estate at Epsom. A bough was cut from a tree with a 
nest containing two young Rooks, and taken in an open waggon from Epsom to the 
Temple and fixed to a tree in the gardens. The old birds followed their young and 
fed them, and they remained and bred there. The following year a Magpie built in 
the gardens. Her eggs were taken, and those of a Rook were substituted, and in due 
course were hatched there. ‘It was a pleasant thought,” as Leigh Hunt observes, 
“supposing the colonists had no objection. The Rook is a grave legal bird, both in 
his coat and habits; living in community, yet to himself, and strongly addicted to 
discussions of mewm and tuum,”—Ep, 
