Part 8

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Ways of the Crows

Rooks would seem to believe that while there is life there is hope. A dead rook displayed before other rooks for the first time attracts no particular attention beyond a casual inspection. But if a rook is wounded, and especially if it hops about with a broken wing, other rooks will swoop about it, and hover above with wonderful perseverance, squawking all the time excitedly, even in spite of a man with a gun. We have seen a hundred rooks perch on a fence to take stock of a relative caught in a trap set to pheasant eggs.

The cunning of rooks, crows, and magpies is very marked at nesting-time; and the keeper who would shoot them by hiding and waiting within shot of their nests may wait for hours in vain if the birds have seen him approach--as they seldom fail to do. The birds are cunning enough to watch from the top of a tall, distant tree, until they see the enemy go away, when they will return at once to the nest in full confidence. But they may be tricked quite easily. Let two men with a gun go together to stand below a rook's nest. Away go the nesting birds. Then let one of the men take his departure, with or without the gun, while the other waits. The birds will return promptly, as though they imagined both men had gone.

The keeper has small sympathy with the crow tribe, and takes every opportunity to reduce their numbers. Sometimes he will carry a ferret to an open spot, over which crows or others are likely to fly, peg the ferret down, and himself lie in wait with a gun. No rook, crow, magpie or jay can resist the temptation to mob the ferret. So the keeper takes advantage of the widespread bird-hatred of the weasel tribe. He traces a lost and wandering ferret by the wild clamouring of the jays that have caught sight of the bloodthirsty creature, or by hints from other birds, great and small.

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The Crow as Terrorist

Carrion crows hold mysterious sway over rooks; a single pair of crows will drive a great crowd of rooks from a rookery. Yet a crow, when compared to a rook, does not seem to be much more powerful or armed with a much more formidable beak. A casual observer would find little difference between a rook and a crow in the hand. If a pair of crows were pitted in a duel against a pair of rooks, the balance of power would make the odds slightly in the crows' favour no doubt. But one imagines the rooks would still have a sporting chance. Probably crows have a black enough reputation among other birds to inspire a general fear. And rooks are cowards. It is a common sight to see them put to shameful flight by peewits or missel-thrushes when they have ventured near the others' nesting-places. Yet a rook could kill a missel-thrush or peewit if it had the pluck to fight. The gamekeeper knows that the hissing and spitting of a sitting partridge will cause a rook to approach her very cautiously. A jackdaw, one would say, has ten times the spirit of a rook.

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Imperial Rooks

We have a little story of how some rooks paid a pretty compliment to an Empress. The preceding tenant of the Empress Eugénie's place at Farnborough is said to have spent hundreds of pounds in a vain attempt to induce rooks to build in the trees. Old brooms were hoisted--real rooks' nests, with and without eggs, were fixed in the most tempting sites among the tree-tops--young rooks were procured and given every attention--and some were even hatched and reared artificially. But the rooks refused to colonise. Then came the Empress; and promptly the rooks came also. Soon a flourishing rookery was established. Perhaps the new-comers, too, were exiles.

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Rook-Pie

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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Birds for Stock

In February the work begins of catching up pheasants for stocking aviaries, to supply the coming season's eggs. In mild Februaries, keeper after keeper tells the same sad story--he "can't catch no hens." Many of those caught in food-baited traps in mild weather are weak and unsound, and some are injured by shot, and so are not desirable for stock. The birds most capable of producing plenty of fertile eggs and strong chicks are those that scorn to enter a cage, except during hard or snowy weather. Some keepers make a practice of catching up the desired number of stock-birds before covert shooting begins. Otherwise they are caught up early in February--so that they may settle down to the new way of life before the laying season is upon them.

"Catching up" is, in its way, a fine art. One secret is to place the cages, before use, in the principal feeding-places without setting them for action, for a few weeks. Cages of wire-netting with a roomy, horizontal opening at one end, after the style of a lobster-pot, are most effective; a scanty trail of corn leading on to an ample supply within. These cages are ever ready, and so catch bird after bird; they have the drawback that if the captives become restive they are liable to bark their heads on the wire. Less satisfactory traps are made with lengths of wood (local underwood is used preferably, to allay suspicion) and only so high that when the trap is thrown the birds cannot injure themselves if frightened. These traps seldom capture more than one bird at a time, and they may be thrown accidentally. A small annoyance of pheasant-catching is provided by the active little tits of the wood, who carry the corn outside the cages, and scatter it far and wide for the pheasants to pick up without running any risk. When pheasants come regularly to feeding-places in fair numbers, a large and effective cage is built of hurdles, one hurdle square. The birds are allowed to grow accustomed to feeding therein. One day the keeper lies hidden, and makes a family catch by stealthily dropping a shutter attached to a string. Where a wood with plenty of pheasants joins a belt or wide hedgerow the keeper may erect guiding wings of wire-netting, which converge on a covered-in tunnel, and then gently beats the wood through in that direction. The pheasants are run into captivity in a short time, and with little trouble.

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Old Hens

In the gamekeeper's eyes a hen pheasant becomes an old hen when she enters upon her second nesting season. But all cock pheasants are old birds when they have seen their first Christmas--only seven or eight months having passed over their glossy, green heads. With the New Year the youngest of the cocks is old in craft, guile and cunning, and all the keeper's skill is taxed to checkmate his endless ways of escape. A beat of the wood has no sooner started than all the birds depart to the point farthest from the beaters.

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A Gamekeeping Problem

When catching up pheasants for the laying-pens, there is always the difficulty of preventing their escape from the wire-net enclosures, and it is interesting to see the different devices by which this trouble is met. The enclosure must not be covered over with wire-netting, for the birds, whenever startled, would fly upwards and injure themselves--and it is wonderful with what perseverance a pheasant will fly up again and again, until its pate has no skin left, and sometimes until it can fly up no more. So the keeper sometimes covers the enclosure with string netting, small enough to prevent the birds escaping, and large enough to prevent them catching their heads and hanging themselves. Others follow the hawker's system, called brailing, attaching Y-shaped pieces of leather to one wing so that it cannot be opened for flight--or the wing may be tied with a piece of tape. The wings are treated in this way in turn, lest one should grow stiff through having no work.

Pheasants bred simply for stocking purposes are pinioned when small birds, as are wild duck; but this reduces their value when their egg-laying days are numbered. Some keepers cut the flight feathers of one wing, but the birds cannot then fly again until the shortened quills have moulted and new ones have grown. But a bird whose flight feathers have been pulled out in the spring will grow fresh ones by June, when she is turned out of the pen. At this time the bird with cut wings is at a heavy disadvantage, alike in escaping the dangers and in mothering any brood she may succeed in hatching out in the woods.

How shall a pheasant gather her chicks beneath her wings if she have only a wing and a half?