96 
NATURE NOTES. 
torn off and had come crashing to the ground, ploughing up the 
turf in their heavy fall ; and in the last decade the rooks had 
seen ladders reared and men with saws and axes lop here a 
branch and there a branch, or with complicated girths of chain 
and iron rope secure a doubtful bough to the main stem. But 
the waving topmost branches where the birds built had for the 
most part been left untouched by winds and men alike, and every 
year the black nests of the rookery appeared among the feathery 
twigs and the ceaseless cawing heralded the return of spring to 
many a winter-weary heart. 
But there came a day when to the city fathers in council 
assembled was put a motion for demolishing the rookery. 
Experts had pronounced the trees to be dangerous. But a 
summer or two since in the still noon of a July day, a giant 
bough, weighted with its full foliage, had fallen without warning 
to the ground, dealing death, alas, to two children who, all 
unsuspicious ^of danger, played in the grass beneath ; and then 
many of us had learnt for the first time that in our English elm, 
that divides a nation’s affection with the oak, there lurks an ever- 
present danger, a danger no less to be feared when the leaves 
rustle thickly in summer on the full-grown tree than in the 
tearing gales of the equinox. The precautionary supports of 
bands and chains were now declared to be insufficient protection, 
and the old trees were saved from root and branch destruction 
only by a resolution in favour of pollarding. And so for pollard- 
ing the order went forth, but no one told the birds. 
February belied altogether its proverbial cognomen of “ fill- 
dike;” mild April-like days, with a few sharp frosts filled up the 
brief month. And long before the coming of March the rooks 
assembled in their conclave, fluttering, soaring and circling 
above and around the old trees, descending to the grass below 
and again rising when disturbed, with clamourous indignation, 
to the safety of the elm tops, all unconscious of the doom of 
their ancestral homes. 
Even when the work of devastation began, and the gang of 
destroyers with their tall ladders, their axes and hatchets, worked 
steadily on from tree to tree leaving lopped and unsightly trunks 
in their wake, the birds still fluttered and cawed at the farther 
end of the line of trees. As the ruthless band came nearer and 
yet nearer, and the groaning cry of the splitting and rending 
wood — the cry of a living thing to anyone that has ears to hear — 
was followed by the loud crash of the falling limb as it toppled 
to the ground, the rooks rose, cawing loud alarm, from the trees, 
to wheel for some minutes in the air and finally settle again. 
When the attack had reached the last tree, when the ladders 
were planted and the fellers, axes in hand, had ascended, the 
birds who had taken a last stand here as if loth to believe that 
one refuge would not be spared to them, rose and took wing, 
sailing away, a black cloud in the blue sky, to wliere they might 
find a new and securer home. 
