We talk of having a crow to pick with someone. Is eating crow the same as eating humble pie? Is a scarecrow meant to apply only to birds of the corvine class? And, of course, in these islands when we talk of crow, we generally mean a rook, that baggy-trousered one, often with its face almost bereft of feathers. Their flocks, coming home at night to the rookery, set up a wonderful chatter before they settle down. Shakespeare had it both ways when he wrote, in Macbeth: "Light thickens and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood." You will see in many parts of the country just now, a rook standing sentry over the nest of his mate. And what a nest it is. From the ground it is so far away because they usually select only the best trees. Richard Jefferies, long ago, wrote of a well-structured rook's nest. It should be in a forked branch to allow bottom and sides to be supported. It should not be a branch that sways too much. Strong, therefore, but giving a little in the wind to ride out a gale. There may be more ballast in it than you can see from the ground. The foundation is cemented together with mud or clay. And, of course, they may well return year after year to the same nest, patching up where necessary, and adding to them if any of it has been lost in the meantime.
Somewhere in the early novels of Henry Williamson, does he write about the long-gone habit of shooting young rooks in the nest? David Tomlinson refers to this in the Field. He tells us the young are known as branchers or perchers. Special low-velocity rook rifles were made to cope with this non-sport. He quotes a Colonel Hawker who records in his diary for May 12th, 1831, an "unprecedented bag of perchers. I had in all about 5 1/2 hours actual shooting, in which time I got and distributed to the poor the enormous number of 216 young rooks and at least 100 more were picked up by outsiders and other parties."
Tomlinson wonders if the poor were pleased with the booty. But many of the birds we eat are worm-eaters, if that was the reason for lack of enthusiasm. More likely, even the poor thought the exercise a model of unnecessary cruelty to nestlings. No reason why the meat, once the deed was done, should be any more unwholesome than that of other worm-eaters, snipe, woodcock, chickens - which in those days ran free. And the same article records a recipe taken from Exotic Food by Rupert Croft-Cooke. The secret is to wrap rook breasts with steak and cover with a rich gravy into which a glass of sherry has been poured. So people are still eating rook? The poor old bird. Why do we attribute pillaging to him? For when someone is being defrauded of money we say he is being rooked. Think well of those steady birds as they stand sentinel beside their brooding mates away up in that tall tree.