Some rookeries have been established for centuries, likeancestral homes with history behind them as rich and as long as any nobility. No coat of arms, no heraldry resonates as loudly, as profoundly as the sight and sound of rooks in their historic territory. In the vast rookery at Hatton Castle, a few miles to the north of here, there are thousands of nests where, every February, the rooks return to rebuild and repair their former homes. They choose to build nests in tall trees, in high, open situations, protected from predation by other birds probably by the proximity of other corvids and from the malign attention of humans by height. Rooks have occasionally adopted the dubious, unrookish and probably insecure practice of nesting on buildings as other birds do. E. M. Nicholson writes in Birds and Men that after the Napoleonic Wars, London rooks were seen to nest on the weathervanes on the turrets of the White Tower in the Tower of London and on the wings of the dragon on the vane of Bow Church. They can’t have enjoyed the sophisticated life of inner-city London, even at these well-chosen sites, because the experiment was never seen to be repeated.
As with us all, human or bird, history has formed what corvids are, their behaviour the product of their long evolution, of lives often lived in close proximity to humans, subject to the demands made on us all to learn, adapt, survive. Their social organisation is complex, highly developed and whilst there are differences in the social lives of different corvid species, most are broadly similar. Ravens seem to live in the least social way, rooks and jackdaws the most.
The basis for most corvid existence is the monogamous pair. Many live in flocks, move in flocks, roost in flocks, separating to mate, nestand rear young. Most corvids live in ‘nuclear’ families, parents and offspring, for the length of the breeding season, the raising and growing season at least, until the offspring are fledged. Some young will leave their parents, some will remain, sometimes for as long as a year, ‘helping’ to rear the next generation. Among the ones who leave, it has been shown that the females often travel further, putting more distance between themselves and their homes than males.
Certain niceties of interaction smooth the ways of crowded roosts, allowing corvids to live together without conflict in the numbers they do. There are necessary foundations to their relationships: mutual recognition, the ability to learn quickly, the skills of negotiation. To us they all look the same. Chicken (individual though she is to us) is in appearance as all rooks appear to be. I see many every day and whilst I’ve tried to see differences, apart from size or feather condition, a slight difference in the face, I can’t. They do not, however, encounter such problems. Corvids’ recognition of one another is a prerequisite for the kind of organised, highly social existence they lead, for recognising family members, accepting and reintroducing ones who have gone away and returned. They may even be rather better at both mutual and inter-species recognition than we are. Not only do they recognise one another, corvids can recognise individual humans, and there are countless stories of people involved in crow research of one sort or another being singled out from among large, busy crowds to be personally, individually subjected to harassment, a kind of revenge, no doubt, for what crows appear to regard as unwarranted scientific attention. (Chicken certainly recognises many people, apart from themembers of her immediate family. Some she greets with particular enthusiasm and what may or may not be expressions of welcome and pleasure.)
If corvid distribution is uneven, it’s because each species has its preferences, or imperatives, dictated by the physical, evolutionary, climatic and social factors that have made it what it is. Ravens are birds of high, quiet places, of mountains; rooks, birds of farming
As with us all, human or bird, history has formed what corvids are, their behaviour the product of their long evolution, of lives often lived in close proximity to humans, subject to the demands made on us all to learn, adapt, survive. Their social organisation is complex, highly developed and whilst there are differences in the social lives of different corvid species, most are broadly similar. Ravens seem to live in the least social way, rooks and jackdaws the most.
The basis for most corvid existence is the monogamous pair. Many live in flocks, move in flocks, roost in flocks, separating to mate, nestand rear young. Most corvids live in ‘nuclear’ families, parents and offspring, for the length of the breeding season, the raising and growing season at least, until the offspring are fledged. Some young will leave their parents, some will remain, sometimes for as long as a year, ‘helping’ to rear the next generation. Among the ones who leave, it has been shown that the females often travel further, putting more distance between themselves and their homes than males.
Certain niceties of interaction smooth the ways of crowded roosts, allowing corvids to live together without conflict in the numbers they do. There are necessary foundations to their relationships: mutual recognition, the ability to learn quickly, the skills of negotiation. To us they all look the same. Chicken (individual though she is to us) is in appearance as all rooks appear to be. I see many every day and whilst I’ve tried to see differences, apart from size or feather condition, a slight difference in the face, I can’t. They do not, however, encounter such problems. Corvids’ recognition of one another is a prerequisite for the kind of organised, highly social existence they lead, for recognising family members, accepting and reintroducing ones who have gone away and returned. They may even be rather better at both mutual and inter-species recognition than we are. Not only do they recognise one another, corvids can recognise individual humans, and there are countless stories of people involved in crow research of one sort or another being singled out from among large, busy crowds to be personally, individually subjected to harassment, a kind of revenge, no doubt, for what crows appear to regard as unwarranted scientific attention. (Chicken certainly recognises many people, apart from themembers of her immediate family. Some she greets with particular enthusiasm and what may or may not be expressions of welcome and pleasure.)
If corvid distribution is uneven, it’s because each species has its preferences, or imperatives, dictated by the physical, evolutionary, climatic and social factors that have made it what it is. Ravens are birds of high, quiet places, of mountains; rooks, birds of farming
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