When Rooks Eat Eggs, 71 



the birds by depriving them of their natural insect food that 

 thej^ are driven to depredation. It will be necessary to be 

 on guard for some time ; bad habits once acquired may last 

 even more than one season. Probably the half-dozen rooks 

 first seen amongst the coops tasted two or three, and, finding 

 them eatable, brought their friends in numbers the next 

 morning." 



During recent years a great deal of evidence has been 

 accumulated respecting the destruction of eggs and young 

 pheasants in preserves by rooks. In the spring of 1897, at 

 the residence of Sir Walter Gilbey at Elsenham, it was dis- 

 covered that the rooks had suddenly taken to the destruction 

 of the eggs of the turkeys which were allowed to breed in the 

 open, and three nests had been ravaged, the rooks being caught 

 at their evil work by the keeper and one of the visitors. No 

 less than fifty eggs had been destroyed, those only escaping 

 on which the hens were sitting. Having destroyed the whole 

 of the turkey eggs available, the rooks then turned their atten- 

 tion to the pheasants' eggs in the coverts, the report of the head 

 keeper the next morning being that the eggs that had been left 

 and not collected for hatching under hens had been destroyed 

 by them, and during the season many hundreds of eggs were 

 thus lost before they could be collected by the keepers. Since 

 then the rooks have been kept in check. 



The great increase in the number of rooks throughout the 

 country in the first decade of the twentieth century, coupled 

 with the fact that when pressed by hunger, as in the case of 

 a drought, they take to egg stealing and other depredations, 

 has caused them to become formidable enemies of the game 

 preserver. 



Crows are even more destructive than rooks. As an instance 

 of their evil influence I may quote from Mr. Ogilvie Grant's 

 work on " Game Birds." Mr. Grant writes as follows : " I 

 was passing through a Scotch fir plantation forming part 

 of a large estate in the North of Scotland where thousands 

 of pheasants are annually reared and turned down. The 



