Rook, silhouette (photo from catb)
What with all these nature pieces soon I'll be growing a beard and sleeping in ditches. Hang on...
Living World, Radio 4's 'gentle weekend natural history programme' recently went to the Norfolk coast to witness the raucous spectacle of 80,000 rooks roosting in a ancient woodland. A great little program full of simple joy and knowledge. Thanks to Speechification for pointing it out. And for hosting an Mp3 of the show!
And there is also this from Roger Deakin's posthumously published book, Wildwood, a book about man's relationship with wood, and woods. The chapter on rooks is a fantastic evocation of a night spent camping beneath a rookery in another Norfolk woodland, this time a little further inland. As Deakin sets camp in his bivouac tent at the foot of a huge stand of Ash trees he notices that 'the sky can seem very pale in summer once you've grown accustomed to the darkness. I could make out the silhouettes of trees, but the rooks and their nests melted into the general blackness. In the wood, complete silence but for the occasional minor rustling further off. Starlight filtered down, strained through the black leaves...As I began to drift in and out of sleep, drugged by bluebells, I felt doubly submerged, a long way beneath the surface on the sea floor of the wood. Once I was woken with a jolt by a sudden mad commotion in the rookery caused, I suppose, by a bad bird dream: a pouncing fox in the skull of a rook that sent a wave of alarm through the canopy.'
He wakes at dawn to the glorious cacophony of the rookery
Hours later, while the sun was still in the horizon I drifted back into consciousness to the most raucous of dawn choruses...Settling my head back into the mossy pillow, I exulted in the luxury of waking in a rookery in full cry.
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 sun that turned the green to gold around them, their black feathers gleaming blue, green, purple and bronze, absorbing the warmth. 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 destinations 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 the tilt of a wing to glide far away across the valley towards the church on the far hill...The more they flew, the more noise the rooks made. Whether you can call it melody is the question I lay pondering...I think of their utterings 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...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 from where I lay that they had quite a rich language. 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 all 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...
Posted by poacher
in place, nature, landscape
at
10:54
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