Gods of the Morning. John Lister-Kaye
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