THE COMMON ROOK. 
130 
periods of festivity also. When the waters retire from 
meadows and low lands, where they have remained any 
time, a luxurious banquet is provided for this corvus, 
in the multitude of worms which it finds drowned on 
them. But its jubilee is the season of the cockchaffer 
(melolantha vulgaris), when every little copse, every 
oak, becomes animated with it and all its noisy, joyful 
family feeding and scrambling for the insect food. The 
power or faculty, be it by the scent, or by other means, 
that rooks possess of discovering their food, is very 
remarkable. I have often observed them alight on a 
pasture of uniform verdure, and exhibiting no sensible 
appearance of withering or decay, and immediately 
commence stocking up the ground. Upon investigating 
the object of their operations, I have found many heads 
of plantains, the little autumnal dandelions, and other 
plants, drawn out of the ground and scattered about, 
their roots having been eaten off by a grub, leaving 
only a crown of leaves upon the surface. This grub 
beneath, in the earth, the rooks had detected in their 
flight, and descended to feed on it, first pulling up the 
' plant which concealed it, and then drawing the larvae from 
their holes. By what intimation this bird had discovered 
its hidden food we are at a loss to conjecture ; but the 
rook has always been supposed to scent matters with 
great discrimination. 
It is but simple justice to these often censured birds, 
to mention the service that they at times perform for us 
in our pasture lands. There is no plant that I endeavor 
to root out with more persistency in these places than 
the turfy hair-grass (aira caespitosa). It abounds in all 
the colder parts of our grass lands, increasing greatly 
when undisturbed, and, worthless itself, overpowers its 
more valuable neighbors. The larger turfs we pretty 
well get rid of; but multitudes of small roots are so 
interwoven with the pasture herbage, that we cannot 
separate them without injury ; and these our persever- 
ing rooks stofck up for us in such quantities, that in 
some seasons the fields are strewed with the eradicated 
plants. The whole so torn up does not exclusively 
prove to be the hair-grass, but infinitely the larger 
