1 1 8 Up in the Morning Early. 



The crow is a dirty feeder ; the rook is by comparison 

 clean ; the crow is solitary — that is, it is seldom seen 

 save alone or in pairs ; the rook is social, and loves 

 always to go in bands, to show that it is so, and when 

 high on wing, takes a course always as straight as an 

 arrow. Tennyson is right when he speaks of the old 

 fellow " that leads the clanging rookery home " — he 

 might have spoken of him as leading the clanging 

 rookery out almost at sunrise. An incessant hard- 

 working insect-destroyer, and a true farmer's help, the 

 rook too often comes in for a bad return ; for not only 

 is he shot and hunted down, but he is cruelly destroyed, 

 often by poison laid in the fields. A writer in an 

 authoritative paper, and the owner of a rookery, said 

 that one year, to satisfy himself, he now and then 

 shot a rook or two to examine their crops. He got 

 nothing but grubs and wire-worms, and now and then 

 a beetle, up to the 20th of April, when he found some 

 score of particles of oats in the husk; but on carefully 

 examining them, he observed a small whitish streak 

 under the envelope of the husk, and he found imbedded 

 in the kernel a wire-worm. It was extended length- 

 wise, gorged with its milky substance, and in colour 

 exactly the same as the juice it was feeding on. This 

 was the food during the time the grain was in the state 

 of transition ; but, after the first week of May, it fed 

 entirely on wire-worms, now of full natural size and 

 colour, and from that date not a particle of grain was 

 found in the stomach of a single rook.* 



* It is very surprising to find Mr. John Burroughs (" Fresh Fields,'' 

 p. 267) writing of " the crows or rooks, as they are usually called," and 

 throughout the whole passage speaking of them alternately as crows 

 and rooks, when it is clear it was the latter he meant. He seemed to 

 fancy that the carrion crow was the only other crow. 



