Roohs' and Rookeries. By James Small. 165 



look on and bear and suffer in silence. Jackdaws are wilder and 

 more easily frightened than rooks, as I have already said ; and 

 a proof of this is that when a gun is fired in the direction of a 

 high flight of rooks and jackdaws (for the latter always accomp- 

 any the rooks) the daws from their wild and sudden side darts 

 show that they are much more alarmed than the rooks, which 

 swerve comparatively little on hearing the shot; and yet the 

 rooks are nearer any shot so fired than the daws, which in all 

 such assemblages fly above the rooks. 



It is only of comparatively recent years that jackdaws have in 

 considerable numbers taken up their abode and hunt with the 

 rooks. The cause of this is, I think, the want of what may be 

 called normal nesting places for the jackdaws. I have no hesi- 

 tation in saying that jackdaws are ten times as numerous now 

 as they were forty years ago ; whereas the places in which they 

 naturally prefer to nest have not increased in number, hence 

 they are driven into new localities and new kinds of nesting 

 places. The favourite nesting places of the jackdaw are fissures 

 of cliffs and scaurs, ruins of abbeys and castles. These have not 

 increased in number ; so the young birds have had in a sense to 

 emigrate ; and some have taken to the woods where they nest 

 with the rooks, either in the holes of trees or in open nests built 

 in the dark centre of the upper branches of the spruce fir ; and 

 large numbers have found their way to Galashiels, where, in 

 that busy town, they eagerly pursue their calling, which seems 

 to be the closing up of every other chimney with a nest. At 

 Springwood Park, a few jackdaws build in some rabbit holes 

 in a steep bank. 



Every colony of rooks has its own hunting ground. The birds 

 do not of course confine themselves to an exact boundary line, 

 or quarrel as some bipeds do over march fences. A few miles 

 of take-and-give now and again, or doing a little hunting on what 

 might be called neutral or other ground, counts as nothing ; but 

 as a rule they keep pretty much the same ground year after year, 

 just as a number of the small birds to our knowledge do. In the 

 mid-summer and winter months when all the ordinary rookeries 

 are forsaken, and the birds from these brigade and lodge together 

 in vast multitudes in the large and sheltering woods called 

 winter rookeries, such as Sunderland Hall, Mellerstain, and 

 Longnewton, the birds from the forsaken rookeries, daily return 

 and feed on their old territory. 



