rds came to build nests at all, instead of remaining
satisfied with the simpler plan of laying their eggs in the ground that
is still good enough for the petrels, penguins, kingfishers, and many
other kinds. Protection of the eggs from rain, frost, and natural
enemies suggests itself as the object of the nest, but the last only
would to some extent be furthered by the gregarious habit, and even so
we have no clue as to why it should be any more necessary for rooks than
for crows. To quote, as some writers do, the numerical superiority of
rooks over ravens as evidence of the benefits of communal nesting is to
ignore the long hostility of shepherds towards the latter birds on which
centuries of persecution have told irreparably. Rooks, on the other
hand, though also regarded in some parts of these islands as suspects,
have never been harassed to the same extent; and if anything in the
nature of general warfare were to be inaugurated against them, the
gregarious habit, so far from being a protection, would speedily and
disastrously facilitate their extermination. Another curious habit
noticed in these birds is that of flying on fine evenings to a
considerable height and then swooping suddenly to earth, often on their
backs. These antics, comparable to the drumming of snipe and roding of
woodcock, are probably to be explained on the same basis of sexual
emotion.

The so-called parliament of the rooks probably owes much of its detail
to the florid imagination of enthusiasts, always ready to exaggerate the
wonders of Nature; but it also seems to have some existence in fact, and
privileged observers have actually described the trial and punishment of
individuals that have broken the laws of the commune. I never saw this
procedure among rooks, but once watched something very similar among the
famous dogs of Constantinople, which no longer exist.

The most important problem however in connection with the rook is the
precise extent to which the bird is the farmer's enemy or his friend. On
the solution hangs the rook's fate in an increasingly practical age,
which may at any moment put sentiment on one side and decree for it the
fate that is already overtaking its big cousin the raven. Scotch farmers
have long turned their thumbs down and regarded rooks as food for the
gun, but in South Britain the bird's apologists have hitherto been able
to hold their own and avert catastrophe from their favourite. The
evidence is conflicting. O