High in the Orrels above the Goosepool

High in the Orrels, when there were still geese around the Goosepool, they have nested longer than anyone can remember. They were the noisiest and most obvious of all the animals that accompanied us in prehistory as we spread across the landscape, altering it as we went, bringing our domesticated animals with us. Some of them came, like the Orkney vole, in the boats of peoples crossing seas to colonise, bringing animals and fodder for their new farms, and creatures hiding in the fodder or as pets brought by their children. ‘Stop fiddling with that bloody Jackdaw,’ their parents will have said, ‘and help us with the hunter-gathering.’ All these creatures followed us as we littered the countryside with our waste and our manure, stored peas and beans and grains in our barns and bartons, and scattered seeds on the open fields. Some came because they liked the changes, moving from eastern steppe lands to new farms where the trees were cleared and meadows, pastures and leasowes made the landscape and the ecology more like the plains back home. Some, like the Royston crow, came to feast on the abundant afterbirths littering the monastic sheep walks at lambing time, and stopped coming when the open rubbish pits of Poland offered year-round pickings. Many were unwelcome, creeping into our houses and eating our cheese, leaving greasy rings behind them on the wood where they squeezed into the holes they gnawed in the wainscoting.

Our ancestors were ready to call any creature vermin, no matter how it got here. But these, high in the trees on the other side of the common, above the Goosepool, were among the creatures about which we were the most ambivalent. Their calls, the BBC sound effects people will tell you, create a rural English village churchyard vibe better than all others. If they leave their colony in the trees above your house, you may fear that a death is foretold. Once people saw their colonies almost as a property, like a hen roost, and shot the young birds every springtime to bake into pies while their meat was still untainted. Shooting the young was, oddly, also thought to stop the birds leaving their colonies and thus might help you to reach a decent old age. For some unfathomable reason they might decide to leave and start a colony elsewhere, but sometimes they stayed for centuries. There was a wood where they nest in the alders above the Goosepool, when the enclosure map was drawn in 1778, and when they made the Tithe Map in 1839 half of this wood was still there, called the Orrels, the dialect word for Alder. The fields around were called the Stocking Field, Lower Stocking and Hither Stocking, all names for fields made by felling woodland and simply leaving the stumps to decay while the grazing animals gradually turned the wood into a meadow, which would have created ideal conditions for rooks to find the insects of grassland like leatherjackets that are their staple. It is perfectly possible that the rooks have been there all that time. They will have heard the ploughboys calling to ox teams ploughing the strips on the open fields, and seen children driving cattle to graze on the commons. The wood would have been a busy place, full of coppice workers cutting poles and stripping tan bark. At hay and corn harvest the whole village would have been out scything and raking, reaping, binding , stooking and gleaning, and there was spare corn for rooks to glean even before the gleaning bell had rung. They will have lived through hard times too, after the enclosures, when the people of the land lost their ancient rights and doubtless needed to make rook pie more desperately than was ever necessary when they worked the land together, before they were pauperized by the enclosure acts, a fever of aristocratic theft so headlong that in the year of my village’s enclosure almost the entire year’s parliamentary business was taken up with turning commons and village fields into private property for rural gentry. And in spite of the hunger of the dispossessed, these birds clung on, whoever used the land below them. Even in the modern era of biodiversity collapse, these resourceful and intelligent birds held up well until recently, though in the last 30 years or so they have been following the curlew, the cuckoo and the swift towards oblivion. Numbers in Wales declining by 58% between 1995 and 2015.

They were believed by some to run a kind of democracy- a parliament - in which they could be judged and condemned by their peers and sometimes even executed. Whether this is more than legend is unlikely, but it seems that our village ancestors knew that rooks were subject to the constraints and advantages of all social animals, and that their society was complex and communicative. If you live beneath them you will hear the pairs talking confidentially to each other with a much wider vocabulary than the caws that set the scene for radio plays. You will see non-verbal communication too, wing-shivers and beak rattling, and females invitingly lifting their tails. If you lived beneath them and somehow learned to recognise them individually, you would see that they have friends with whom they spend time, and others they avoid. With their partners they mate for life as faithfully as the villagers below them – that is to say, imperfectly. Ornithologists call this extra-pair copulation.

Like many of their relatives, they roost communally. They only stay overnight at the colony during the breeding season, but all year round they get together there in the evenings to socialise noisily, before heading off to roost somewhere else when it is almost dark in order to avoid detection. Roosting together is thought to provide the opportunity to communicate about possible food sources to visit in the morning, when they fly off splitting into smaller foraging parties as they go, together with their Jackdaw hangers-on. This suggests that their communication is not just social reassurance but actual communication of information that enables them to agree on a plan for the morning’s foraging. For this to work they need to be able to envisage and even somehow discuss possibilities, make choices and agree among themselves.

I have always found them interesting, but my curiosity was spiked again today when I saw them in my beech tree pulling off twigs and flying with them to build nests in the top of a huge Weymouth Pine just beyond my orchard. They don’t usually visit me much. Last winter I thought some of them might have been thinking of starting a new roost in a massive oak tree just behind the compost heap. Nothing came of it, but now they seemed to have started a new colony at the bottom of the orchard.

A breeding colony of birds has to be just that - a colony. Often there is a critical number below which it will not work. Frank Fraser-Darling discovered, watching colonies of gulls in the Western Isles, that a new colony had to reach a certain size before the gulls could breed. He suggested that when this number was reached the courting displays excited not just prospective mates but were a turn-on to other couples, and helped all the birds in the colony to come into breeding condition at the same time. This results in slightly fewer of the young being predated.

The Passenger Pigeon, an American bird once so numerous that the flocks darkening the skies took several days to pass overhead, was reduced by American enterprise and frontier spirit to a mere handful of birds in a very few years. When they realised the unforgiveable thing that they had done, it was impossible to save them because they would only breed in colonies so vast that the trees broke beneath their weight. In Cincinnati zoo the last pair just couldn’t get it on and died, unable to exist in solitude.

And so the birds at the bottom of my garden did not arrive by accident. For this to happen six or seven pairs had to somehow decide, or become aware, that a new colony might be a plan. It is almost impossible to observe such a process, as it happens very rarely, but for a good number of birds to form a new colony there has to be a reason, though we may never be able to find out what that reason is. And there has then to be an awareness, or a discussion, or an excitement of some sort, about finding a new site to build their nests. Maybe the need comes first, or maybe the site, but if my Weymouth pine is suddenly so desirable, why has there never been a rookery in it before? And so we may never understand the hows and whys of this new rookery. But we can be certain that for it to happen there had to be an idea, shared by a group of rooks who got along together. The idea had to be followed up by investigations, and site visits, and however they discussed it they had to come to a decision before they could all arrive here together as a group of individuals united in their community project, to choose nest sites and start pulling my beech tree to pieces in order to raise their young together. They can not have arrived here without some sort of process both of thought and of discussion leading to agreement. They must each be capable of envisaging a new nest site, or maybe several possibilities, and of considering the choices and arriving at a decision. And even if this is led by a dominant bird, rather than being a democratic decision, at least one bird, the leader, has to be capable of such thought processes, and if one is so must all.  And now my house will be loud every springtime with the jostling and arguments inevitable in any society, with the stealing of nest materials and neighbourly squabbling, and with the concupiscent murmurings of the nesting pairs and the squalling of the hungry young. The females will incubate and brood for weeks while the males go out foraging for themselves and for their mates. They will stride and hop about the meadows and the arable in their black shiny baggy pants stabbing their strong beaks unerringly into the ground, a wireworm or maybe a grain of corn at every stab, guided by senses we can only guess at. By the time the young fledge the beaks of the males will have worn so much that they will be measurably shorter than those of the females who have been sitting on the nests the while. At the bottom of my garden will be a society maybe more vital, more genuinely cooperative, more egalitarian and certainly more truly socially communicative than the village beneath, living more sustainably within the landscape than any of us. They may be smart enough to outlive us. My neighbour Colin, like many farmers, does not bother to distinguish between the Rook and the Crow, but open-mindedly offers to shoot them all. If he comes anywhere near I will be well positioned, in the most neighbourly way, to offer to wrap his bloody shotgun round his scrawny neck. Maybe it is my protection these clever birds have sought