Though May is still the month of rook-shooting, this sport has passed
out of fashion, and rook-pie is no longer an honourable dish--it has
sunk, indeed, into a place of disrepute from which no amount of steak,
seasoning, and hard-boiled eggs can rescue it. In old times a dozen
rooks would be sent and received with compliments, like a brace of
pheasants; and labourers prized a few rooks as much as the charity beef
at Christmas. But now one might search far before finding a cottager
who would deign to eat rook-pie. The rooks are shot and buried, or are
left where they fall beneath the rookery trees, for foxes to find and
carry to their cubs.
The farmer and the gamekeeper have a common cause against the rooks,
which, when they are not attacking the interests of the one are
pilfering the produce of the other. An April blizzard consoles the
keeper for the pheasants' eggs it ruins by blotting out a generation of
rooks. For when such a disaster overtakes a rookery late in April, as
young birds are nearly ready to leave the nests, the parent birds are
hardly likely to make another attempt to rear a brood. But when rooks'
eggs are frosted before or during hatching there will be late broods,
not hatched until the trees are in full leaf. Then the young rooks
might escape the watchful eye of the keeper were it not for the habit
of squawking for food, and for the garrulous chuckling of the parent
birds when feeding the hungry mouths. These late broods increase the
toll of the eggs and young game birds, parent rooks taking five times
as much food as the others.
Old rooks are very cunning in search of prey. On one excellent
partridge-shoot there is a hedge bordered by telegraph poles. It
is the only hedge on the place, and in seasons when grass and corn
are backward it is packed with partridge nests. The rooks of the
neighbourhood have learnt the trick of sitting on the telegraph wires,
the better to find the way to the nests, as revealed by the movements
of the nesting birds. Thus, waiting and watching in patience, in time
they find out every nest in the hedge.
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