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4

And Then There Were Rooks

Above the dark and drooping world

Let the empty skies disclose

Your dear, delightful crows.

‘Crows’, Arthur Rimbaud

Crow realized God loved him –

Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.

So that was proved.

Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.

‘Crow’s Theology’, Ted Hughes

I can’t claim any prescience; neither am I given much to old wives’ tales or pithy country aphorisms. An abundant fungal flora or a heavy crop of rowan berries doesn’t seem to me to mean anything more than a bumper year for fruiting fungi and rowan trees. When the greylags and pink-footed geese arrive earlier than expected, harrowing the September skies with their treble-pitched clamour, all that it tells me is that the season in their Arctic breeding grounds – Greenland, Iceland, Lapland – is turning, and that their migratory instincts have fired a little earlier than in some other years.

Not so Old Malkie, famous round here for his doom-laden predictions, when I bumped into him at the Beauly petrol station. ‘That’ll be the snow on the way any day now,’ he gloomed, waving his walking stick to the puckering late-October clouds and shaking his platinum curls. (To my intense chagrin, three days later there was a sugaring of snow on the three-thousand-foot pyramidal crest of Beinn a’ Bha’ach Ard [hill of the high byre], which impales our cloud-laden horizon to the west.)

Yet despite all the head-shaking and dark muttering by the nay-sayers and would-be country sages in our glen, it did not seem to me to follow that blizzards are imminent, that we are in for a harsher winter than usual or that the end of the world is nigh. But I am moved by the wholly unexpected.

In early November our rooks arrived back at their long-established nests in the tall limes, oaks and sycamores that line the Aigas drive. You couldn’t miss them. They were their usual boisterous personalities, like inner-city youths: racketing, arguing, bossing, coming and going, flapping, cawing loudly and generally carrying on like – well, like rooks always will. They were nesting – at least, they were going through the unmistakable motions of nesting. They were paired off, gathering and stealing each other’s sticks, repairing old nests and even building from scratch. But it was only just November. Now that was unusual. We don’t expect the rooks to attend their nests until February, sometimes late February, if the weather is hard. But November?

It didn’t last. In ten days they were gone again, flocking away in rowdy gangs tangled with jackdaws, down to the potato and stubble fields recently harvested, the arable soils of the Beauly Firth as dark and rich as molasses, where they joined up with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others from far and wide. I never did discover why they had arrived back at their rookery so unexpectedly, so absurdly early. It was as though they were feeling some collective corvid memory lapse and a need to check it all out, just to make sure they were still welcome there, like old boys and girls heading back to school for nostalgia’s sake. I logged it away as odd and, as the New Testament has it, ‘pondered these things in my heart’.

With hindsight I now know that something other was indeed up, although it took a long time to become clear to me. At a human level we tend to view and assess climate change by large events, not small ones. Hurricanes, cyclones, storms and cloudbursts, rampaging floods and withering droughts are the dramatic yardsticks by which we measure swerves away from expected ‘normal’ patterns of weather. It’s hardly surprising: they come rampaging in and imperil us with their power and potential for disaster – or far worse. But in reality they are probably just the crescendos in the overture, the pushy high points of much more subtle shifts and pulses that are happening, pianissimo, all the time, most of which go unnoticed or at best recorded only by meteorological boffins with their noses pressed to electro- barographs and computer models.

In just a few weeks we would know that whatever undetected signal had triggered the rooks’ unseasonal return to their nests was indeed part of some much grander orchestration, something much more all-encompassing, much more . . . yes, perhaps ‘sinister’ is the right word, after all.

* * *

Not just God, but I also love rooks: Corvus frugilegus, the very fittingly named ‘foraging crow’. The onomatopoeic crow – hrōc in Old English, rork in Old Dutch, craa in Old Scots, all, including the word ‘crow’ itself, inflections of the distinctive kraa calls everyone immediately recognises. I love them for their dissonant, rough-edged, pub-brawl rowdiness, all of which, as one of my earliest childhood memories, is permanently etched into my cerebral cortex.

I need to come out and declare this now because so many people seem not to like rooks, lumping them together with every other crow and often refusing to acknowledge the many differences – although getting it off my chest feels a bit like owning up to some contemptible vice. Farmers grind their teeth and spit venom when packs of rooks swoop down, like brigands, to raid their winter barley fields, ripping the germinating seeds and the stash of protein-rich sprouts from the rain-sodden tilth, just like the old Scottish Border reivers, ‘. . . where all men take their prey’.

In a fit of rage a farmer near here felled a handsome spinney of mature Scots pines just to prevent the rooks nesting there, and another, also given to uncontrollable outbursts of anger against many aspects of the natural world, attempted to sue his peace-and-wildlife-loving neighbours for having the temerity to harbour a rookery in their trees. Even those who don’t suffer loss of any kind further darken the rooks’ iridescent blackness by ignorantly dismissing them as just ‘crows’, uttered with a sneer and all the disdain one might award to football hooligans or drug dealers; an ornithological unfairness equivalent to lumping swans together with geese or writing off fieldfares and redwings as just thrushes. In fact, of course, the crow family is famously diverse, even the black or nearly black ones on the British list: rooks, jackdaws, choughs, carrion crows and ravens differ widely in character, habits, appearance, diet and their manifold interactions with people. It is hard to argue that crows bring many obvious or tangible benefits to mankind, but then neither do most other bird species unless we gain pleasure from their songs, their colourful displays or from killing and eating them, little or none of which relate to crows. Rightly or wrongly, the crow family have long been cast in the villain role and little I can say will alter that.

But, for me, rooks are different. I love everything about rooks and I have clung to the emotive authority of their cries since infancy, when I knew no birds by name and saw them only as flickering glimpses in the great whispering beech trees through the bedroom window of my childhood home. So I am proud to have a rookery at Aigas. I get personal and possessive about them when they return from their winter forays to nest in my trees and surround our lives with their remarkably human and often comical racketing.

The Aigas rookery is very old. We know from the first-hand testament of an old lady (Helen Foucar, now long deceased), who spent her childhood holidays here more than a hundred years ago with guardian godparents, who in their turn had been here since the 1860s, that every May back then the young birds were shot at the point of fledging, as they perched on the edge of their nests, by local Highlanders, the estate workers whose perquisite it was to harvest and consume this seasonal bounty. But our rookery is probably much older than she or her guardians knew. (Although the rhyme is thought to allude to Henry VIII’s sacking of England’s monasteries during the Reformation, the ‘Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’ might well have been rooks: they were commonly eaten by country folk right into the second half of the twentieth century.)

This centuries-inhabited house sits in a wider landscape largely denuded of its trees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by a population of Highland people perpetually teetering on the precipice of a failed harvest and famine. All trees had a price not so much on their lofty crowns as on their hearty bowls and stalwart limbs, for structural timber, furniture or firewood, for charcoal or just ready cash, anything to stave off the crushing poverty of what we would now consider to be a third-world existence barely compatible with civilisation. Only when the majority of Highlanders upped and left for southern cities and the New World in the nineteenth century (more than eight thousand left from this narrow glen, Strathglass, a diaspora extending well into the twentieth century) did the trees return either by planting or by nature’s unsleeping opportunism. Ours are the legacy of that era: mature oaks, limes, sycamores and one or two big ashes, along with the naturally regenerated native birches, Scots pines, goat willows, hazels, rowans and geans (wild cherries).

Every spring I look forward to the rooks’ return to the rookery, to the soap opera of their constant bickering, sabotaging and thieving from their neighbours’ nests. One large and now well-established nest high in the swaying tops of a mature lime tree is in full view from our bathroom window. I can lie in the bath and watch the daily machinations of their competitive, gangland twig war, drink in the rough old music of their calling, ponder the urgent electricity of instinct blending with guile drawn from the hard-edged experience of survival, the ultimate judgement of all living things. But it is from their flight that I draw the greatest delight.

When a wild wind comes calling, hustling in from the south-west like an uninvited guest, its warm, wet embrace rises and falls, wuthering down the mountains and whirling through the crowns of our tallest trees, building zest and power, so often the precursor to short, stinging rain squalls. My eyes immediately avert to the clouds, to the roiling snowy-grey constants that are such dependable tokens of our time and our place in nature. Their ever-changing back-cloth seems to complement the drama of the rooks’ flight, bringing vibrant focus to their ragged black shapes and awarding purpose to their swirling patterns. More vividly than any television forecast or smart-phone app, the clouds and the rooks speak to me about the day ahead.

They seem to sense the west wind’s arrival. Effortlessly they lift off into the quickening breeze, crying out for the others to follow, circling, rising clear of the trees in a ragged pack, out over the river and the broad valley for the sheer glory, for the wild giving of it, as though it has been sent specially for them.

From my study window I watch black rags, like small yachts, tossing on a tumultuous sea. They lift vertically, towering in a whirling tangle of wings, only to fall again in a joyous tumble of free-fall, gyrating, rolling and sweeping up to do it all over again. No one can convince me it isn’t fun – more than fun: it’s a delight longed for after days of dreary doldrums. They are school-kids let out into the playground after a tedious lesson; racehorses led prancing to the field gate and released into spring pasture after days in a stable, heels to the sky. They fly with all the carefree abandon of a sheet of newspaper picked up and hurled willy-nilly along an empty beach on a stormy day.

The consequence of loving rooks is that I have come to care for their well-being. (Jackdaws and ravens too but, I have to confess, not so heartily the malevolent villains of the black pack, carrion or hoodie crows – ‘Crow, feeling his brain slip,/Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder’, Ted Hughes). When the crofters’ arable crops in the little river fields of this strath began to decline in the 1970s – no more oats, turnips and potatoes lovingly planted, tended and harvested by bent backs and weathered hands, stoically buttressed by universal little grey Ferguson tractors – I worried that the rooks would suffer and leave. But they clung on. The sheep and cattle fields still delivered up a harvest of grubs and worms, bugs and beetles sufficient to stave off the rooks’ departure.

I did notice that they spent more time away in winter, away on the wide arable fields of the Black Isle, stocking up on corn and barley shoots, gleaning energy enough to be back in February for nesting and raising a brood. The world around them constantly changes at the hand of man, sometimes beneficent, sometimes profoundly taxing, but rooks are resilient and supremely intelligent birds: quickly they learn to adapt to man’s latest agricultural whim and, as a happy consequence, the Aigas rooks are with us yet.

Then there is the wonderful cacophony of rooks. Their vocabulary is so expressive and varied. It certainly isn’t restricted to the rasping ‘caw’ so often dumped on them, although, of course, in a flock they can be world champions of the cawing cause when they need to be.

From my bath on a spring day, with the window flung wide, I can phoneticise at least fifteen calls. (I often wonder how many naturalists habitually keep binoculars in the bathroom and can indulge their interest from the comfort of the bath – not, as Lucy was quick to point out, the most arresting image.)

The commonest is the benchmark ‘caw’, but which I prefer to present as ‘kaarr’ or ‘aarrr’ with a flourish of canine growl at the end that is absent from ‘caw’. A bird with an urgent message to impart repeats this over and over again, with a forward thrust of the head and open bill, wings akimbo, the whole body jetting the sound forward with a counter-balancing upward flick of the fanned tail to send it on its way.

Then comes a collection of similar but quite distinctive calls of similar tonal quality, but with differing consonantal emphasis: a short, sharp ‘kork’ or ‘dark’ and a stretched ‘daaark’, a muted ‘graap’, an even quieter ‘grup’ and still softer ‘brup’, uttered as an afterthought or an aside to some louder exclamation. But these would all appear to be communication calls tossed into the broader clamour of the rook din – the rook cocktail party – as opposed to more intimate exchanges taking place between nesting partners, to chicks or near neighbours.

These more conversational utterances call for a gentler tonal approach altogether, and a much wider choice of pitch. ‘Rirrp’, ‘trip’, ‘braa’, a high-pitched ‘creek’ and the disyllabic ‘err-chup’ and an ‘err-eek’ exclamation can emerge from the same rook within the same conversation. Then there is a sharp, wholly un-rook-like click or clunk, such as you might make with your tongue on the roof of your mouth, often repeated over and over again. All this is often accompanied by a low, drawn-out ‘er-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-k’, a sound better suited to a tropical jungle than a Highland glen, uttered from somewhere gullet-glottal, somewhere in the depths of the corvid syrinx, very easy to imitate by drawing your breath slowly into your chest across your vocal cords, an irritating sound I delighted in making as a small child in the full knowledge that it would annoy adults. Rooks can keep this up for several seconds at a time, often eliciting astonishment from friends and visitors: ‘What on earth is making that noise?’

To me, to someone who loves rooks, these sounds are interesting and reassuring, but the overall generality of rook music (yes, I find them musical), when the rookery is in full nesting swing, when the fifty or sixty birds are constantly on the move, bickering and haggling, like Arab traders in a bazaar, crying as loudly as they can, thrilling the air with a living resonance, is as evocative and emotive a natural presence as the slow thunder of breakers on a shingle shore or the muffled silence of Christmas snow.

Just now our rookery has twenty-nine nests. Years ago, when gentle crofting agriculture in the glen delivered its beneficial nutrients to all manner of wildlife (we had lapwings, curlews, corncrakes, grey partridges and corn buntings here, all now long gone), the Aigas rookery rose as high as thirty-eight, but the gradual arable abandonment has taken its toll and twenty-nine now seems to be the most they can manage.

They are big nests, each one the size of a pumpkin jammed into a high fork. They are often very close, occasionally touching each other, the spread apparently governed by the availability of suitable forks rather than any other territorial imperative. They occupy five big sycamores in one cluster and two fine old English oaks, and then an outlying nest in the lime tree I view from my bath, a hundred and sixty yards as the rook flies, off to the west. This last is recent, only a few years old, whereas the others are decades established, repaired and rebuilt year after year in the same places.

At first I thought the new nest (claimed as ‘my pair’) was a welcome expansion, but extending my daily bath time (to Lucy’s irritation – ‘What are you doing in there?’) just to spy, I became concerned. There are plenty of big trees to expand into alongside the main rookery, so why, I wondered, was this pair building so far away? Slowly I came to realise that something else was going on. The two birds responsible, clearly a pair-bonded item, seemed to be outcasts from the main colony. And there was mischief afoot – more than mischief.

Right from the first day that they started to build a nest they were being mobbed by gangs from the main flock. Rowdy threes and fours would fly across at regular intervals to harry them. Initially they surrounded the incipient nest and harangued its builders with aggressively raucous cries, hopping from branch to branch, occasionally diving in and clashing with the builders. Then, when each of my pair flew off to gather sticks, one or more of the gang would follow and mob the poor bird, often causing it to drop its twig. Meanwhile, if they left the nest unattended even for a minute, others of the gang would nip in and dismantle it, skimming back to the main rookery with stolen twigs in their bills.

I watched this going on for days (‘Do hurry up and get out of the bath, John’), slowing the nest-building process right down – two twigs forward, one twig back – but never quite defeating my poor outcasts. Long after all the other nests were complete and most of the hens were incubating, my valiant pair was still patching and repairing, still suffering raids from occasional mobsters, until finally the bullies had too many domestic duties of their own to bother. Only then was my pair able to lay eggs and settle to some quieter level of conjugal privacy and isolation.

It was also an interesting observation of human behaviour to note that when rook domesticity finally won through, Lucy began to take much more interest in the whole drawn-out affair. Our morning bath sessions became punctuated with ‘What are they doing now? Have they managed to lay eggs yet? Do you think the chicks have hatched? Oh, I do hope those beastly bullies will keep away.’

They did somehow manage to rear two young, and a year later a second nest was built beside the first, perhaps by one of my pair’s young with a new partner, but they were to suffer the same treatment to such an outlandish degree that after a while they gave up and disappeared. A Mafia mob from the main rookery quickly stole all their sticks, dismantled the whole assemblage so that the nest vanished altogether, a thuggish gang retribution as if they had refused to pay their protection dues. This quite upset the normally placid Lucy, whose verdict was immediate and damning: ‘Those bullies deserve to be shot.’

This outcast/outlier nest phenomenon is not unknown. It’s well documented in the literature, although it seems to be shrouded in myth and folklore. One plausible explanation is that rooks are so obsessively gregarious that they won’t allow new nests unless they are very close by. This is all very well, but it doesn’t explain why the outcasts should be outcasts in the first place. One frequently cited report claims that following the destruction of an outlier nest the outcast pair were then subjected to a ‘rook court’ where the elders of the colony sat round in a ring in a field and appeared to be admonishing the demoralised pair in the middle. Hmm, well, I think that may be one for Old Malkie.

Admonished outcasts or not, my pair won. They hung on and raised their brood and to this day the nest is intact, a handsome black blob high in the lime, and I can still lie in my bath and watch them hubbub-ing about their urgent affairs. Whether or not they are now accepted members of the main rookery is unclear. They still draw attention from the mob, but far less aggressively, and for the present the nest remains perhaps not virgo, but certainly intacta.

* * *

Before I depart the colourful world of rooks (for now – their story is far from over), I have one more tale to tell. In the 1950s, when I was twelve years old and at a Somerset boarding school, I rescued a fledgling rook that had been storm-gusted from the nest before it could fly. I don’t think it was badly hurt, but it sat huddled in the long grass at the foot of a large elm, crying wheezily to its parents high above who probably hadn’t noticed one of their brood missing.

I was thrilled. By the age of twelve I had raised (not always successfully) many orphans: squirrels, rabbits, hedgehogs, a whole brood of greenfinches after their mother was snatched by a sparrowhawk, even a fox cub. I caught the genderless rooklet in my hands and carried it home rejoicing. I gave it a suitably sexless name – Squawky. For the rest of that summer term, my last at the school, I was the envy of many boys, who vainly searched the drive avenue of elms for Squawkys of their own.

Squawky never flew and I never knew why. There was nothing broken, both wings flapped vigorously, and he knew enough about flight to use them for extended flapping lurches from perch to shoulder or head or other convenient landing. Try as I might, I never got him to do more than cross a room. Outside I thrust him up into the air in the hope of teaching him the joy of rapturous flight. He flapped raggedly to the ground twenty yards away where he landed entirely normally, then strutted about looking indignant. I took him back to the avenue to show him the wavering in-and-out flights of his own kind and to listen to their raucous chorale. He would sit on my forearm, head tilting quizzically at the wild birds high above, but with no hint of any inclination to join them. After many fruitless attempts I gave up.

He became my constant companion. During lessons he would sit outside the classroom on a windowsill peering in and occasionally tapping on the glass to attract my attention. Other boys either loved Squawky and followed me enviously about, begging me to let them ‘have a go’, by which they meant let him sit on their shoulder for a while, or they jealously resented the attention I garnered and sniped at me with snide remarks like ‘Serves you right if he craps on your essay.’ Even the headmaster revealed tolerant sufferance in his mild but humourless sarcasm, ‘Lister-Kaye seems to know nothing about arithmetic but everything about crows.’

At the end of term, and to my utter desolation, on the illogical pretext that because I was moving on to another boarding school I couldn’t look after a pet rook, I was not allowed to take Squawky home. A friendly domestic lady called Ruby, who worked in the school kitchens and who for many weeks had offered a clandestine supply of left-over scraps for Squawky, came to my rescue. A gem she truly was. She took pity on me or the rook, or both, and offered to have him. Her farm labourer husband agreed to build an aviary onto their cottage in the village nearby. With a heavy but grateful heart, I delivered the rook into it on my last day.

Life moves on. I have to confess that I never gave Squawky much thought again until one day twenty-two years later I happened to be driving past that Somerset village (the prep school had long since closed) and turned down its only street, trying to remember where precisely Squawky had been housed. I recognised the cottage straight away, unmissable for the spacious wire-netting aviary attached to its gable end. I parked the car and walked up the garden path. To my utter astonishment, I was met by rasping cries from a ragged-looking and extremely ancient rook with an almost bald head. It was Squawky.

He was certainly not beautiful. His naturally featherless cheeks had developed the leathery baldness of a welding glove, a mark of age all rooks over three produce as an adaptive response to habitually piercing the damp soil with their dagger bills in search of leatherjacket grubs. The soiled feathers around the bill simply give up and fail to grow; in the same way some vultures and storks are bald for endlessly thrusting their heads inside rotting carcasses. At nearly twenty-three Squawky’s cheeks were huge and as muddy white as a mushroom, made more sinister by the almost total absence of black feathers on his domed skull. He looked like a bad caricature of a vulture with a straight bill or a stork with a short one. But most comical of all were his pantaloons. His feathery trousers, reaching well below his black-scaly knees, were a cross between gamekeepers’ plus-fours and the 1930s tennis shorts worn by Indian army colonels.

The kind farm-labourer husband was long departed to build celestial aviaries, and Squawky and the widow Ruby, his almost-stone-deaf, now-in-her-eighties mistress, had lived on in happy andro-corvid companionship for many years. I spent a rapt and nostalgic hour shouting to her so loudly that Squawky, several yards away outside, became agitated and excitedly joined in most of the conversation. Her hearing can’t have been so bad because at one point I made the forgivable slip of calling the bird ‘my rook’. As quick as a flash the old lady leaned forward and corrected me: ‘No, dearie, my rook.’

I fed Squawky some porridge and scrambled egg – his favourite dish of more than two decades lovingly prepared by Ruby, which he gobbled noisily and with great vigour, swiping his bill clean on the edge of the bowl when he’d finished. I departed still not quite believing that rooks could live so long.

* * *

My enthusiasm for rooks has digressed me from what was so extraordinary in November. They should not have been nest-building at all. I didn’t know it at the time, but something was upsetting the biorhythms that govern the lives of most of our wildlife, whether visible from my bath or not. The rooks were confused. At first I thought it might be the length of daylight that baffled them, imagining that early November had the same length of day at our latitude as their normal nesting time in February, but I was wrong. There is more than an hour and a half’s difference – far too broad a wedge to disorientate an intelligent bird like a rook.

Could the temperature have been the same, triggering some deep genetic impulse to build nests? But, no, the mean temperatures for early November and late February were more than 4º Celsius apart for the previous year. So what had done it? What had brought them to my bathroom window, to dance and haggle through the un-leafing tree tops, to soar and plunge and cry among the striping rays of the lowering sun? Just what else was going on?