blackness by ignorantly dismissing them as just ‘crows’, uttered with a sneer and all the disdain one might award to football hooligans or drug dealers; an ornithological unfairness equivalent to lumping swans together with geese or writing off fieldfares and redwings as just thrushes. In fact, of course, the crow family is famously diverse, even the black or nearly black ones on the British list: rooks, jackdaws, choughs, carrion crows and ravens differ widely in character, habits, appearance, diet and their manifold interactions with people. It is hard to argue that crows bring many obvious or tangible benefits to mankind, but then neither do most other bird species unless we gain pleasure from their songs, their colourful displays or from killing and eating them, little or none of which relate to crows. Rightly or wrongly, the crow family have long been cast in the villain role and little I can say will alter that.
But, for me, rooks are different. I love everything about rooks and I have clung to the emotive authority of their cries since infancy, when I knew no birds by name and saw them only as flickering glimpses in the great whispering beech trees through the bedroom window of my childhood home. So I am proud to have a rookery at Aigas. I get personal and possessive about them when they return from their winter forays to nest in my trees and surround our lives with their remarkably human and often comical racketing.
The Aigas rookery is very old. We know from the first-hand testament of an old lady (Helen Foucar, now long deceased), who spent her childhood holidays here more than a hundred years ago with guardian godparents, who in their turn had been here since the 1860s, that every May back then the young birds were shot at the point of fledging, as they perched on the edge of their nests, by local Highlanders, the estate workers whose perquisite it was to harvest and consume this seasonal bounty. But our rookery is probably much older than she or her guardians knew. (Although the rhyme is thought to allude to Henry VIII’s sacking of England’s monasteries during the Reformation, the ‘Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’ might well have been rooks: they were commonly eaten by country folk right into the second half of the twentieth century.)
This centuries-inhabited house sits in a wider landscape largely denuded of its trees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by a population of Highland people perpetually teetering on the precipice of a failed harvest and famine. All trees had a price not so much on their lofty crowns as on their hearty bowls and stalwart limbs, for structural timber, furniture or firewood, for charcoal or just ready cash, anything to stave off the crushing poverty of what we would now consider to be a third-world existence barely compatible with civilisation. Only when the majority of Highlanders upped and left for southern cities and the New World in the nineteenth century (more than eight thousand left from this narrow glen, Strathglass, a diaspora extending well into the twentieth century) did the trees return either by planting or by nature’s unsleeping opportunism. Ours are the legacy of that era: mature oaks, limes, sycamores and one or two big ashes, along with the naturally regenerated native birches, Scots pines, goat willows, hazels, rowans and geans (wild cherries).
Every spring I look forward to the rooks’ return to the rookery, to the soap opera of their constant bickering, sabotaging and thieving from their neighbours’ nests. One large and now well-established nest high in the swaying tops of a mature lime tree is in full view from our bathroom window. I can lie in the bath and watch the daily machinations of their competitive, gangland twig war, drink in the rough old music of their calling, ponder the urgent electricity of instinct blending with guile drawn from the hard-edged experience of survival, the ultimate judgement of all living things. But it is from their flight that I draw the greatest delight.
When a wild wind comes calling, hustling in from the south-west like an uninvited guest, its warm, wet embrace rises and falls, wuthering down the mountains and whirling through the crowns of our tallest trees, building zest and power, so often the precursor to short, stinging rain squalls. My eyes immediately avert to the clouds, to the roiling snowy-grey constants that are such dependable tokens of our time and our place in nature. Their ever-changing back-cloth seems to complement the drama of the rooks’ flight, bringing vibrant focus to their ragged black shapes and awarding purpose to their swirling patterns. More vividly than any television forecast or smart-phone app, the clouds and the rooks speak to me about the day ahead.
They seem to sense the west wind’s arrival. Effortlessly they lift off into the quickening breeze, crying out for the others to follow, circling, rising clear of the trees in a ragged pack, out over the river and the broad valley for the sheer glory, for the wild giving of it, as though it has been sent specially for them.
From my study window I watch black rags, like small yachts, tossing on a tumultuous sea. They lift vertically, towering in a whirling tangle of wings, only to fall again in a joyous tumble of free-fall, gyrating, rolling and sweeping up to do it all over again. No one can convince me it isn’t fun – more than fun: it’s a delight longed for after days of dreary doldrums. They are school-kids let out into the playground after a tedious lesson; racehorses led prancing to the field gate and released into spring pasture after days in a stable, heels to the sky. They fly with all the carefree abandon of a sheet of newspaper picked up and hurled willy-nilly along an empty beach on a stormy day.
The consequence of loving rooks is that I have come to care for their well-being. (Jackdaws and ravens too but, I have to confess, not so heartily the malevolent villains of the black pack, carrion or hoodie crows – ‘Crow, feeling his brain slip,/Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder’, Ted Hughes). When the crofters’ arable crops in the little river fields of this strath began to decline in the 1970s – no more oats, turnips and potatoes lovingly planted, tended and harvested by bent backs and weathered hands, stoically buttressed by universal little grey Ferguson tractors – I worried that the rooks would suffer and leave. But they clung on. The sheep and cattle fields still delivered up a harvest of grubs and worms, bugs and beetles sufficient to stave off the rooks’ departure.
I did notice that they spent more time away in winter, away on the wide arable fields of the Black Isle, stocking up on corn and barley shoots, gleaning energy enough to be back in February for nesting and raising a brood. The world around them constantly changes at the hand of man, sometimes beneficent, sometimes profoundly taxing, but rooks are resilient and supremely intelligent birds: quickly they learn to adapt to man’s latest agricultural whim and, as a happy consequence, the Aigas rooks are with us yet.
Then there is the wonderful cacophony of rooks. Their vocabulary is so expressive and varied. It certainly isn’t restricted to the rasping ‘caw’ so often dumped on them, although, of course, in a flock they can be world champions of the cawing cause when they need to be.
From my bath on a spring day, with the window flung wide, I can phoneticise at least fifteen calls. (I often wonder how many naturalists habitually keep binoculars in the bathroom and can indulge their interest from the comfort of the bath – not, as Lucy was quick to point out, the most arresting image.)
The commonest is the benchmark ‘caw’, but which I prefer to present as ‘kaarr’ or ‘aarrr’ with a flourish of canine growl at the end that is absent from ‘caw’. A bird with an urgent message to impart repeats this over and over again, with a forward thrust of the head and open bill, wings akimbo, the whole body jetting the sound forward with a counter-balancing upward flick of the fanned tail to send it on its way.
Then comes a collection of similar but quite distinctive calls of similar tonal quality, but with differing consonantal emphasis: a short, sharp ‘kork’ or ‘dark’ and a stretched ‘daaark’, a muted ‘graap’, an even quieter ‘grup’ and still softer ‘brup’, uttered as an afterthought or an aside to some louder exclamation. But these would all appear to be communication calls tossed into the broader clamour of the rook din – the rook cocktail party – as opposed to more intimate exchanges taking place between nesting partners, to chicks or near neighbours.
These more conversational utterances call for a gentler tonal approach altogether, and a much wider choice of pitch. ‘Rirrp’, ‘trip’, ‘braa’, a high-pitched ‘creek’ and the disyllabic ‘err-chup’ and an ‘err-eek’ exclamation can emerge from the same rook within the same conversation. Then there is a sharp, wholly un-rook-like click or clunk, such as you might make with your tongue on the roof of your mouth, often repeated