There are only about a dozen nests in this rookery, high in the sycamores on the steep bank of the River Wear, but this morning’s cacophony of cawing came from at least 40 rooks. All winter they’ve paced pastures, mostly silent, heads down, black-suited, baggy-trousered, as though searching for something lost in the grass. Now here they’ve gathered, a swirling, exuberant flock that seems like a celebratory reunion of winter’s survivors.
Visiting this rookery in spring has become something of a ritual because its sounds revive childhood memories. In the 1950s, my grandmother worked on a farm in Sussex, looking after a floristry crop called statice, an everlasting cut flower that was dried and stored in a flint-knapped barn shaded by towering elms – home to a rookery.
In the school holidays I’d meet her to share lunch in the hayloft, sitting on a pile of hessian sacks, while sounds of the rookery murmured through the tiles. Hearing those discordant caws now can transport me through space and time, back to the stillness of the barn with its creaking floorboards and bundles of lavender-coloured dried flowers, where motes of dust hung in shafts of sunlight.
Today, peering up into the swaying nests overhead is disorientating, so I steady myself by leaning against a tree trunk, feeling the transmitted power of the wind when the bole flexes against my back. The rooks ride the gusts, sometimes settling into what sounds like conversational cawing, often rising as a raucous flock for no obvious reason. A few bring twigs to repair nests, others seem to be here just to be sociable. Females, perched on the edge of their great heaps of sticks, fan their tails when an interloper lands too close.
Down here, earthbound, there is something Hitchcockian about those dark silhouettes wheeling overhead, with their broad wings, finger-like primaries and bony dagger beaks that prise insect grubs from grassroots. But I recall the rook that perched in a tree outside my window last winter, when the rising sun sent shocks of violet, green and purple iridescence through its glossy black plumage. There is a brutal beauty about these birds, and ancient mystery in their conversations carried on the wind.
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