Wildwood Read online

  By the time I swam into full consciousness, most of the young rooks were out of their nests, perched among the topmost twigs. They basked in the first rays of the sun that turned the green to gold around them, their black feathers gleaming blue, green, purple and bronze, and absorbing the warmth. No doubt the blackness of rooks, crows and ravens has always made them suspect to country people. Occasionally, white rooks have been recorded. Gilbert White mentions a pair near Selborne, stupidly killed by a carter and nailed to the end of a barn, their legs and beaks as white as their feathers. Writing about John Bunyan and his native parish of Elstow, near Bedford, my friend Ronald Blythe discovered another mention of white rooks in some parish records. In 1625, when the author of Pilgrim’s Progress would have been a child of three, the vicar of a neighbouring parish mentions some other member of the family: ‘one Bunyan of Elstow, climbing of rooks’ nests in the Berry Wood, found three rooks in a nest, all as white as milk, not a black feather in them.’

  Rooks build their untidy-looking nests of twigs in a series of strata on top of the previous year’s structure, as storks do. (Look at any archaeological dig in, say, the City of London, and you’ll realize we do just the same.) They choose live, pliable twigs and must weave them well to stand up to the winter storms, lining the nest with leaves, grass, even some clay, hair or wool. With twigs, as with food, rooks are prone to envy, and not above stealing from one another, as people do from building sites. After five or six years of layering, the structure grows top-heavy and may at last tumble down in a gale, a useful find for a cottager in need of dry kindling. I counted eighteen nests in the clump of ashes above me, but I know an oak tree near where I live with over thirty nests in it.

  The parent birds soared off in sallies of flight accompanied by crescendos of cawing, returning with breakfast for the fledglings, who expressed their satisfaction in half-choked high-pitched mewling. Each time they landed, the rooks fanned their tails in greeting: gesture is an important part of their language. A good deal of the rooks’ circling, gliding flight seemed to be nothing other than joyful orisons with no apparent destination in the fields. In February I had watched them here, flinging themselves into a strong wind and somersaulting wildly upward, then diving straight down again towards the wood like bungee jumpers, checking their swoop just in time with a tilt of a wing to glide far away across the valley towards the church on the far hill. Rooks like to fly high, and sometimes, when they arrive directly over the rookery at a great height, they will fold one wing flat against their body and execute a breathtaking perpendicular dive so fast it is audible, twisting at the last moment to land in the tree. This is called ‘shooting the rook’. Gazing straight up through the fish-bone ash leaves, I watched the alteration of layers and shades of green turning to gold where the sun caught them. Studying an ash tree on 24 July 1866, Gerard Manley Hopkins writes in his journal of ‘a bright blind of leaves drawing and condensing the light’ and observes earlier that year in May how the ‘pale window-like green’ of beech leaves is ‘spotted with soft darks by the now and then overlapping of the leaves’. He sees leaves as the windows of the wood, filtering sunlight to a green shade, their ribs the leading of stained-glass windows. Elsewhere, he again writes of ‘the green windows of cabbages in the sun’.

  As the sun came up over the hilltop meadow and shone through the wood, it began to catch the nettle-tops standing sentinel around the glade in flashes of dewy silver, outlining the saw blade of every translucent leaf. It even illuminated the tracery of veins in the wings of the crane-flies before my tent. The misty sun, rising fast now, broke through an oak in the hazel grove and set the lichened ash-trunks on fire. By now the more melodic music of the other birds had found its rhythm and built into full flow: the soft cooing of wood-pigeons, the lyrical blackcaps and lesser whitethroats, the piping of robins and wrens, chiffchaffs and the confident glissando of the chaffinches.

  The more they flew, the more noise the rooks made. Whether you can call it melody is the question I lay pondering. Gilbert White goes so far as to say ‘rooks, in the breeding season attempt sometimes, in the gaiety of their hearts, to sing, but with no great success.’ Most of the old bird-books attempt some version of ‘rude harmony’, ‘sweet thunder’ or ‘musical discord’, but I prefer to think of their utterances as conversation, or the roughest of folksong. Rooks speak in the strongest of country burrs. They are rasping, leathery, parched, raucous, hoarse, strangled, deep-throated, brawling, plaintive, never reticent and, like all good yokels, incomprehensible. No doubt you could play a dead rook like a bagpipe, all drone and no melody. If you found yourself across the fields from a Somerset pub late at night at cider-pressing time, you might hear something like a rookery.

  There is no doubt that rooks rapidly communicate new locations of discovered food to one another. The alternative, or complement, to the language hypothesis is that other rooks simply observe their well-fed fellows and follow them out to the new feeding grounds. A well-filled restaurant is always popular. It is quite possible to learn Rook as you would learn French, or your own language as a baby, just by listening and watching. If I hear the alarm call of a blackbird or moorhen in my garden, I understand it perfectly. Rooks are highly intelligent birds and can soon learn to recognize individual humans. Living as a tribe benefits them through the greater vigilance of the group’s many eyes and ears against predators, but it must also increase their efficiency as foragers.

  One of the books that inspired me as a boy was Konrad Lorenz’s King Solomon’s Ring. My favourite chapter, which I used to read over and over again, describes how, beginning in 1927, he raised a whole colony of free-flying jackdaws at his home at Altenberg in Austria, with the object of studying their social and family behaviour. By the time the book was published, I already had a tame crow of my own, so I felt a strong allegiance to Lorenz’s work. Jackdaws, the cousins of rooks, also live socially, are highly intelligent and communicate with each other in remarkable ways. Unlike most other birds, jackdaw young have no innate fear of their predators, so each generation must inform the next about what is to be feared. They do this by means of a harsh, aggressive alarm call Lorenz calls ‘rattling’. Lorenz also observed that jackdaws form lifelong attachments, as rooks seem to do, and that there is a distinct, well-understood pecking order within the tribe to which all the members adhere without question. Lorenz gradually learnt the Jackdaw vocabulary: ‘Zick, Zick’ is uttered by the courting male to mean ‘Let’s nest together’ and, once in possession of an actual mate and nest, ‘Keep out’. Any act of social delinquency is immediately censured by the other tribe members with a variation of this call, expressed by Lorenz as ‘Yip, Yip’. Most interesting of all is Lorenz’s discovery of the subtle distinction between ‘Kia’ and ‘Kiaw’. The first is the cry uttered in flight by the dominant jackdaws to urge the whole flock outward to new feeding grounds. The second is to urge them home. Thus, ‘Kiaw’ plays a vital role in maintaining the integrity of the flock when one meets another.

  Most birds seem to keep their song quite separate from their language. The staccato alarm cry of a wren or blackbird is quite distinct from its sweet song. Jackdaws, however, incorporate their words into their songs to create, as Lorenz puts it, something more like a ballad, in which they can re-create past adventures or directly express emotions. Not only this, but the singer accompanies the different cries with the corresponding gestures, quivering or threatening like the lustiest performer passionately enacting a song. In a way, the jackdaw is mimicking itself, as a solitary jackdaw kept in a cage will come to mimic human speech, but it may also, Lorenz thinks, be expressing emotion. When a marten broke into the roosting aviary at Altenberg and killed all but one of his jackdaw flock, the lone survivor sat all day on the weathervane and sang. The dominant theme of her song, repeated over and over, was ‘Kiaw’, ‘Come back, oh, come back’. It was a song of heartbreak.

  Intruding on the privacy of rooks from a small tent on the wood floor was never meant to be at
all scientific, but it was plain to me that the birds have quite as rich a language as Konrad Lorenz’s jackdaws. From where I lay, I sometimes heard a private, muted, muttering note, uttered into the depths of the nest behind net curtains, strictly for the ears of the family. Also pitched in a lowered voice was a kind of squeaking that sounded like contentment. The rooks didn’t seem to mind my presence at all. It even occurred to me that having roosted a whole night under the same ash-leaf roof, I had somehow been accepted into their company by some ancient law of hospitality. Rooks are, after all, the most sociable of birds and seem to like to build their nests close to people’s houses.

  I have also noticed more and more rookeries close to roads; apparently the more congested the better. Driving together up the A1 to the Lake District earlier in the spring, Richard Mabey and I began noticing rookeries on roundabouts planted with oaks or hybrid poplars thirty years ago. Even after we turned off at Scotch Corner on to the undulating A66 to Penrith, the rooks still showed a marked preference for nesting by the roadside, ignoring the splendid giant sycamores that command the limestone hills. We whiled away the long car journey speculating on the reasons why. Richard observed that rooks like to range over a wide area, flying in straight lines. Could a major road, he wondered, help them with their bearings? I suggested that road verges are a scavenger’s delight, with discarded sandwiches and early-morning roadkill. Or was there some more subtle attraction such as the combined warmth of sun-soaking tarmac and combustion engines? In the end, we decided the simple sociability of the rook towards our species might just as well be the cause.

  Any rookery confers a special atmosphere on a place, but rooks have always been controversial. Even today, there are those who persist in the belief that rooks are an enemy. At one of our local Suffolk rookeries at Homersfield on the River Waveney, the farmer still enters the copse each spring and shoots into the nests from below to kill the fledglings. This would have been unpopular among our villagers in the past, not out of any sentiment for the rooks, but because they partly depended on them for food. Rook pie was one of the staple dishes of cottagers everywhere, and very nearly the equal of pigeon pie. Like rabbits and pigeons, rooks were part of the unofficial commonage of the parish.

  The early-nineteenth-century naturalist and pioneer conservationist Charles Waterton was the rooks’ first great champion. In one of his two essays on rooks, he tells how he had once been anxious to divert a troublesome footpath on his estate. The local farmers said they would agree to this on condition Waterton destroyed a large rookery in one of his estate woods. The villagers, however, protested that the proposed destruction would deprive them of their annual supply of about 2,000 young rooks. Waterton seems to have stood by his rooks, and the villagers. One of his essays is about the rook’s bill, and the origin of the characteristic bald patch at its base, the popular belief at the time being that the birds rubbed off the feathers by digging in their search for worms and grubs. By observing the development of young rooks, Waterton shows that the baldness is purely natural and unconnected with their feeding habits.

  Waterton did most of his birdwatching from inside trees, living the life of a tree-climber very like Cosimo in Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, who vows at the age of twelve to live his entire life in the branches and never again to set foot on the ground. I have always preferred the succinct original title of the novel: Barone Rampante. Like Cosimo, Waterton was well born and squire of his own considerable estate at Walton Hall near Wakefield. He was also an English Catholic and therefore an outlaw. As is usual in our society for anyone who chooses to think and act for himself, Waterton was branded an eccentric until eventually rescued by Julia Blackburn in her marvellous biography. It was entirely through Julia Blackburn’s love of Waterton that I was first introduced to him, and it was she who first guided me around his lovely wooded estate. It was full of thousands of ancient trees, which Waterton nurtured and protected, even retaining dead, hollow or rotten ones for the sake of the owls, jackdaws and woodpeckers. To protect this paradise on earth from poachers, he spent four years and £9,000 building a massive stone wall up to sixteen feet high and three miles long around Walton Park. Much of it remains, part ruined and covered in ivy and ragged robin: a snail heaven.

  All his life, even into his eighties, Waterton followed the habits of his early life travelling and exploring in the forests of South America. He went barefoot about the park and climbed the trees barefoot, reclining for hours in the boughs of the old oaks, reading books or watching owls or foxes. Waterton stood six feet tall, all but half an inch, wore his silver hair in a brush cut, slept on a bare elm floor with a hollowed oak block for a pillow all his life and was double-jointed until his death. He often wore an archaic tailcoat like a nineteenth-century Sergeant Pepper. At the age of fifty-five, he writes of himself: ‘I am quite free from all rheumatic pains; and am so supple in the joints that I can climb a tree with the utmost facility.’ Thus he was able to write quite casually, in his essay ‘The Rook’: ‘Last spring I paid a visit, once a day, to a carrion crow’s nest on the top of a fir tree. In the course of the morning in which she laid her fifth egg, I took all the eggs out of the nest, and in their place I put two rook’s eggs, which were within six days of being hatched. The carrion crow attended on the stranger eggs, just as though they had been her own, and she raised the young of them with parental care.’ He then abducted the fledgling rooks and had his incredulous gamekeeper befriend and tame them in a similar project to that of Konrad Lorenz with the jackdaws a hundred years later. Unfortunately, the rooks were all so tame they met untimely ends, including one that was drowned by an aggressive chicken. Waterton’s defence of the rooks is that for ten months of the year they eat nothing but insects, especially wireworms and leather-jackets, to the great benefit of the farmer. For just two months they eat his grain too, at seed-time or harvest, or during a hard frost, but Waterton points out that these are low wages for the farmer to pay for their work in the organic pest-control department during the great majority of the year.

  Waterton befriended all the members of the crow tribe, as well as all the hawks. He called his neighbour Sir Thomas Pilkington a scoundrel when he showed him the fresh corpse of the last raven in Yorkshire, and he protected the much persecuted magpie with greater care than any other bird ‘on account of its having nobody to stand up for it’. The popular hatred of magpies was and still is more probably fear, based in the many folk beliefs about their occult powers over our fortunes. Charles Waterton calls the magpie ‘the English bird of paradise’ and made his astonished keeper encourage and protect the birds. Waterton proudly records magpies as other landowners logged pheasants: 34 nests at Walton Hall one season, and 238 birds successfully reared. ‘I love in my heart to see a magpie,’ he writes, ‘for it always puts me in mind of the tropics. There is such a rich glow of colour, and such a metallic splendour of plumage in this bird, that one would almost be apt to imagine it had found its way here from the blazing latitudes of the south.’ His observations of jackdaws led him to anticipate Konrad Lorenz in the conclusion that they mate for life. He thinks the loveliness of the blue, the black and the white in the bastard wing and greater covert feathers of the jay unsurpassed anywhere in the world. ‘Nothing can possibly be conceived more charming. No other known bird in the creation possesses such a rich exhibition of colouring …’ This is high praise from the naturalist who wrote Wanderings in South America.

  Watching rooks strutting about my meadows among the molehills, I often think how like people they are. And in autumn and on winter evenings, I watch amazing numbers of them rowing through the heavens high and straight above my house to congregate noisily in the woods along the Waveney between Wortham Ling and Redgrave Fen. This is a parliament of rooks, several thousand of them, and it has been in session every year as long as anyone round here can remember. The notion that the voluble birds may be engaged in some sort of discourse is natural enough in view of the manifest intelligence of the entire cr
ow tribe. My first encounter with the most distinguished corvid in the history of cinema came one snowy afternoon in the exciting Paris of 1968. I sat with a friend for hours keeping warm in the Cinémathèque watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Uccellacci e Uccellini (literally: Big Birds and Little Birds), made two years earlier in 1966. It is a most engaging film and was Pasolini’s own personal favourite: a surreal, picaresque tale of a father and son taking to the road across Italy from Rome. They are played by the veteran Italian comic actor Totò, and Ninetto Davoli, and are soon joined by a talking crow: a left-wing intellectual crow who poses moral and political questions, delivers ponderous diatribes about Italian politics and society, and tells the story of the medieval brothers Ciccillo and Ninetto, sent by St Francis to preach God’s message of love to the hawks and the sparrows. The crow transposes the pair of pilgrims into the Middle Ages, turning them into the two Franciscans, complete with sackcloth. After long efforts, the brothers somehow learn the language of birds and preach universal love, first to the sparrows and then to the hawks. It makes no difference: the hawks just carry on killing the sparrows, and eventually, driven mad by the moralizing crow, the brothers unceremoniously kill and eat it. If it sounds an odd story, that’s exactly what it is. Pasolini called it an ‘ideo-comedy’. My friend Gilbert and I watched it over and over again, trying to make sense of it, only to realize that the whole point was the very banality of the fable. The film was an elaborate, comic shrug to the old questions about the meaning of life. Feeling that I had a claim to a special relationship with the crows, I was deeply impressed, and the memory of this odd road movie and the slushy snow outside the Cinémathèque on the way home has stayed with me.