Secrets of a small rookery, part three: Crow Culture

Wheatfield with crows by Vincent van Gogh (1890), oil on canvas

What is a crow to you, reader? The answer will vary depending on who you are, where you live and the ways in which - and the extent to which - you connect with your environment.

To many people, crows are a noisy, messy, annoying family of birds with unpleasant voices who attack bins and rubbish sacks, steal songbird chicks from nests, steal farmers' crops and generally cause a nuisance. To others they are intelligent creatures, innovative problem-solvers - fascinating to observe and a source of immense pleasure. I am firmly rooted in the latter camp.

In about 1995, while walking along the Ouse riverbank between Newhaven and Piddinghoe in East Sussex, I witnessed a group of several Carrion Crows manoeuvring a square of plywood, which looked like an old drawer-base that had been washed along the river and stranded on the high tide line. One crow wrestled the square of wood down the riverbank and into the water, where it floated. Each crow in turn then flew into the air and attempted to land on the floating wood, not very successfully, and suggesting an appearance of novice surfers, but obviously able to take an idea and put it into practise. This level of enquiry on the part of the crows was remarkable to observe. Whether they were playing or attempting to gain some advantage, perhaps by using the floating wood as a fishing platform, I could not speculate about, but it convinced me that crows are clever birds.

Soler & Møller (1990) demonstrated that Magpies (Pica pica) learnt to detect Great-spotted Cuckoo (Clamator glandarius) eggs when their nests had been parasitised in areas where the two species had coexisted for some time. The ability to detect these eggs was reduced in areas where coexistence was more recent and, where their ranges did not overlap at all, there was no recognition. Magpies had developed the ability to recognise cuckoo eggs through learning experiences and had tweaked their behaviour accordingly. Other victims of brood-parasites, such Reed Warblers (Acrocephalus scirpaceus) and Dunnocks (Prunella modularis), have shown no such recognition of Common Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) eggs. The New Caledonian Crow (Corvus moneduloides) is a well-documented problem-solver, tool-maker and tool-user (Hunt, 1996). Crows are clever birds and their intelligence has impressed and captured the imagination of the humans in their midst.

To many human cultures crow species are a defining cultural reference: gods or messengers of gods, spiritual beings who may deliver the souls of the dead to the afterlife. They are emblematic, their image having been used in aboriginal art including cave paintings and aboriginal names and costumes, heraldic coats of arms, place names (Rookery Hill, Rookery Way and The Rookery are all about a mile away, as the crow flies, from where these words are being written) and in numerous other creative works. We have exploited crows in our culture and crows have adapted to exploit us too. This entwined relationship can be termed cultural coevolution.

Ravens scavenging a wolf kill-site carcass

Here is an example of cultural coevolution: the automobile is one of the defining images of the American Dream. Perhaps there is an inevitability, therefore, that the American Crow (Corvus brachyrhyncos) has adapted its own culture in response to road vehicles. Traditionally, Ravens (Corvus corax), Magpies (Pica pica) and other corvid species adapted and evolved to scavenge the carcasses of hunted animals which they locate by flying and searching across the landscape, perhaps following packs of wolves or humans to a kill-site. Roadkill could be considered to provide the same opportunity, particularly in areas where kill-sites are less common now than they were in the past, so it is not much of a cultural shift on the American Crow's part to follow roads, which cut like rivers through the landscape, searching for dead deer, rabbit or birds. American Crows have also been observed picking dead insects from the fenders of stationary cars. These behaviours should still be considered as a cultural response; they have been observed in North America (Marzluff & Angell, 2005), but probably also occur wherever crows and humans with cars coexist. In Japan in 1975, Carrion Crows (Corvus corone) were observed at a driving school placing shelled walnuts before the wheels of parked cars so that they would be cracked open as the cars drove over them and away. This behaviour has been adopted by observant crows and has since spread some miles along the Hirose River region (Nihei & Higuchi, 2001).

Further reading provides a wealth of examples which demonstrate the effect that crows have had on European culture, and particularly so on our languages, which will be the subject of part five of this corvine compendium.

I think the relationship between crows and humans, whether it is welcomed, tolerated or despised, dates all the way back through human history, back beyond the 150,000 or so years that Homo sapiens has walked across the world, even back beyond the seven million years since our evolutionary trajectory branched away from our closest extant relatives, Bonobos and Chimpanzees. Crows have been on the wing all this time - they evolved (I think) in the Eocene Epoch about 50 million years ago, although the species we share the world with today are more recent. At the end of the last ice age ten thousand years ago, Hunter-gatherers would doubtless have been in close contact with Ravens, who followed or possibly even led humans along the migration routes towards the great herds of ungulates, where we might have revered the birds, tolerated them or chased them off from a kill. As farming practises spread from the Middle-east westwards across Europe and into Britain about six or seven thousand years ago, we would have put down roots and found ourselves closer to other crow species such as Rooks and Jackdaws, who colonised the fringes of the land cleared by our ancestors and who plundered the insect pests which devoured our ancestor's crops and then helped themselves to the same crops as they ripened.

Four seeds in a hole,

One for the Rook, one for the Crow,

One to rot and one to grow.

During the past few thousand years of civilisation and warfare, battlefields strewn with dead soldiers would have been a happy hunting ground for Ravens, Carrion Crows and Magpies. Survivors who witnessed the battlefield-fallen being pecked and torn apart in a corvine feeding frenzy could be forgiven for holding a fear or awe of those birds whenever their paths crossed.

Gallows-crows

The same crows would have perched upon gibbets and gallows and it is easy to imagine them gathering ahead of a public execution - observant and intelligent birds would learn to recognise the signs, the noise of excitable crowds. The black, ravenous birds would understandably have become symbols of judgement, both human and divine judgement.

The crow or raven might have been the influence of the beak-shaped mask worn by plague-doctors in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. The costume of a waxed or leather cloak was topped with a mask and beak. The beak was filled with straw and aromatic herbs and oils - all to filter and protect the plague-doctor from miasma (putrid air), which was considered until modern times to be a vector of disease. Even Florence Nightingale is alleged to have believed in misama theory, but the Nightingale is a different bird altogether. The beaked mask of the plague-doctor is still a chilling sight.

We have shaped crows' culture and they have shaped ours. It is no wonder that crows became symbols of fear, death and perdition. It is via this background that crows and crow-culture have become braided into our language.

Plague Doctor costume

References:

Hunt, Gavin R. 1996. Manufacture and use of hook-tools by New Caledonian Crows. Nature 379: 249-25.

Marzluff, John M. and Angell, Tony. 2005. In the Company of Crows and Ravens. Yale University Press: New Haven.

Nihei, Y. and H. Higuchi. 2001. When and where did crows learn to use automobiles as nutcrackers? Tohoku Psychologica Folia 60: 93-97. 

Soler, M. & Møller, A.P. 1990. Duration of sympatry and coevolution between the great spotted cuckoo and its magpie host. Nature. 343, 748-750. 

Secrets of a small rookery, part two: Nest-building in an unlikely place

Why do the Southover Rooks nest along a busy road in Lewes?

An insight might be provided by an anecdote involving American Crows observed over a period of years at the University of Washington in Seattle (Marzluff & Angell, 2005). The crows gathered en-masse each morning on the black tarmac of a large parking lot. Wave after wave of crows gathered on the lot. No food or water were present and a theory that the tarmac helped them warm up in the mornings was disproved by temperature readings. Eventually, an elderly Seattle resident informed the observers that the area used to be a landfill site some forty years before and that the crows used to gather and feed on the garbage there. This suggested a promising explanation for the mass gathering on the parking lot: the location could have been a part of the crows' local culture as a former rich source of food which has been passed down through the generations. They had always gathered there.

Referring back to the Southover Rooks, as unlikely as the location of the rookery between Southover Road and the railway line might seem today, it is possible that it was once a larger rookery in a less urban setting and that the Rooks have chosen that location as a nesting site all the time that there have been trees and a local food source. It would be difficult to prove that the rookery is ancient, but it is tempting to speculate that the Southover Rooks have been looking down from the treetops at Lewesians since before the coming of the trains. Perhaps they even watched the erection and dissolution of the Priory, at a time when the Dripping Pan was too saline for Rooks?*

The Southover Road Rookery in Lewes is a modest one. As soon as I see the litter of fallen nest material on the pavement below, I keep a weekly account of nest numbers until around mid-April, when they disappear into leafy privacy for the summer. I have counted the numbers of nests for several years and this is what I have seen:

2011: 35 nests

2012: 24

2013: 31

2014: 34

2015: 30

There are twenty seven so far this year and this number will continue to rise until about late-April.The rate of nest building has been steady this year since I started counting on 29th February. Progress has been noted on the following dates:

29th February: 9 nests

14th March: 17

21st March: 22

29th March: 27

The totals from previous years suggests that the appearance of new nests will slow over the next couple of weeks and they should be completed by the time the swelling buds on the elm and sycamore trees burst into leaf, concealing them behind a green curtain for the breeding season.

There are much larger rookeries dotted along the Ouse valley south to Newhaven. A larger one at Iford contained 71 nests in 2011. The greatest rookery I know of in the Seahaven and Ouse Valley areas is at Bishopstone, where the nest site is so extensive that it has been beyond my capability to fully count the nests. According to my notes, there were a minimum of 300 mixed Rook and Jackdaw nests in 2011, which is presumably the point at which I lost count. I have counted a minimum of 94 nests to date this year, but this is from a distance and is not a reliable figure because I am able only to see a fraction of the nests at this truly magnificent site. The woodland forming the nest site is called The Rookery; the hill above it Rookery Hill and a residential road nearby, just over the hill to the west, is Rookery Way. The rook has named more roads and more villages in England, apparently, than any other bird and it is clearly embroidered into the Bishopstone landscape. It seems that they are rooted in our culture as well as to the land, regardless of how we feel about them.

Fifteen of this year's Rook nests at The Rookery, Bishopstone

*The Dripping Pan, home to Lewes Football Club, nicknamed 'The Rooks', was used as a salt-pan by the monks of the Benedictine Priory of St. Pancras before its dissolution in 1537.

Reference: Marzluff, John M. and Angell, Tony (2005), In the Company of Crows and Ravens, Yale University Press: New Haven.

The Walking Landscape

Walking is a pastime which I have always engaged in with great pleasure and, over the years, with a growing sense of mindfulness. Many a walker may agree that it is the easiest way to meditate: to root oneself in the moment by tuning into the sights, sounds and smells of the landscape and to appreciate its changes throughout a day or from one day to the next, or seasonally.

Walking is definitively human, or hominine. From the time several millions of years ago that Africa tore itself apart to form the Rift Valley, stranding our Australopithecine ancestors in an increasingly treeless landscape, walking became an essentially bipedal necessity of adaptation and natural selection. They thought and walked and somehow survived against overwhelming odds, developing an increasingly confident, upright gait as they did so. Before the invention of the wheel or the domestication of beasts of burden, everything was done with two feet in touch with the ground.

A mindful walker can find that through participating mindfully in any given moment, one can become a part of the living landscape and return to Mother Nature. Not only can one react to the things which stimulate one's senses; those things also react to your presence in a place: the persecuted Magpie is usually the first to take flight upon our approach, whereas the Robin may be of a roughly opposite persuasion. Insects evade capture as a shadow brushes past them. These are roles played out step by step in an unfolding drama.

I believe that walking, above all other modes of locomotion, roots the pedestrian within a landscape in a fluid, progressive state, regardless of an urban or rural setting. Many would agree that riding a horse or bicycle offers a similar sense of rootedness, but walking makes known an opportunity to give one's senses over completely to what is before and around you, more so than all other modes of transport, which require a part of the mind to be given over to driving. Spiritually, we follow a path. The destination is not as important as we might think it is - progress is made simply by following the path.

Walking offers an intimacy which weaves together the light, the sounds, smells, feelings and sights of the enveloping landscape into a sensual tapestry. There is an excitement in exposing oneself to the elements, to leave behind the convenience, the luxury and the safety of modern life and return to that primitive state. Walking is rhythmic, melodious. Walking inspires pure thought, clarity of mind, imagination and creativity.

I am no peripatetic philosopher. Most writers could present you with a more eloquent, articulate manifesto championing the benefits of walking over other means of locomotion. I am a wanderer who feels that walking, when it is possible to choose to walk, ignites something in one's imagination which is otherwise sleepwalking within or in a state of suspended animation during a journey by car or public transport. The vehicle accelerates its passengers, and isolates the commuter, taking away the possibility to join with the landscape and to contextualise the role one might play in the landscape as it speeds past in a long chain of lost opportunities.

Hilaire Belloc, in his 1906 work Hills and the Sea, expressed this feeling perfectly: "The pilgrim is humble and devout, and human and charitable, and ready to smile and admire; therefore he should comprehend the whole of his way, the people in it and the hills and the clouds, and the habits of the various cities. And as to the method of doing this, we may go bicycling (though that is a little flurried) or driving (though that is luxurious and dangerous, because it brings us constantly against servants and flattery); but the best way of all is on foot, where one is a man like any other man, with the sky above one, and the road beneath, and the world on every side, and time to see all".

Driving through a landscape we are, at best, only forming an abstract connection with it. We retreat into a part of our consciousness and often do not remember how we get from point to point, even though we have safely navigated past cyclists, through traffic signals, around roundabouts and stopped or slowed as necessity demanded. We may safely navigate a car across a landscape, but we are not really a part of it in the way we are on perhaps a bicycle or horse, but especially so on foot.

To intimately know a landscape changes the manner in which one passes through it. One might walk on or over an unfamiliar landscape, rather than in or amongst it. A familiar landscape shares its secrets. The Downs are my landscape; I know them and to walk upon them is like returning home. Walking into one's home is to return to familiar, beloved surroundings. The Downland landscape is my home and my companion which allows me into its welcoming embrace. One is enveloped into its folds and combes and dry valleys, and then the landscape unfolds with the progression of each footfall and its secrets are revealed.

A voice whispers in the ear of the familiar walker: "Welcome back, friend. Come, walk with me and I will share with you my secrets". And everywhere then you share the joy of nature, such as in watching Small Tortoiseshell butterflies basking in the March sun by their rabbit-hole hibernaculum; a joy punctuated by the pain of tragic, brutal lives cut short when a dead fox or rabbit or pheasant is revealed before it has met the gaze of the crow or magpie or, increasingly, the red kite.

For a time, whether it may be for the duration of a single walk or for a lifetime, I am a part of this landscape, as it is at all times a part of my inner landscape. That landscape is changed because of my presence within it and, returning home to the place where I have put down my roots, I too am changed, always for the better.

The downland landscape from Swanborough towards Firle (© Steven Teale)

Secrets of a small rookery, part one: Common Ground

Humans often seem to share a negative emotion when it comes to the crow family: indifference, mistrust, fear, dislike or even hatred. Where do these emotions come from? Are they inherent or acquired - weaved into our cultural DNA? The corvids are, to me, the most appealing and fascinating of bird families; the Rook is my favourite.

One of the things which makes rooks a favourite bird is that they stick around; they are constant, ancient and as much a part of the landscape as the Downs themselves. When one thinks Rook, one should also think rootedness. Like their trees, Rooks are rooted in the landscape. Many rookeries have existed longer than living memory - those which have avoided the axe and chainsaw. I have been told that many rookeries are ancient. When the Romans looked fearfully upon Silva Anderida and, later, the Saxons towards Andredsweald - the ancient, seemingly endless, impenetrable southern woodland - the eastern extent of the Sussex Downs remained treeless and formed an open spit of land between the trees and the sea, and possibly had been this way since the tundra retreated north at the end of the ice age, when mud and melt-water carved dykes and plugged valleys. These are the high, open vistas chosen by the Neolithic tribes to bury their kinfolk in the tumuli which punctuate the hills today.

I fancy that the rooks took root soon after those first post-ice age trees, watched by the first hunters, foragers and farmers, flying out of those ancient leaves and onto the ancient turf doing then the same that we can watch them do today and what they will continue to do for as long as the trees and the turf remain neighbourly.

What did those ancient birds think of us plundering their resources? What did they call us for doing so?

Late-February is a good time of year to begin watching rooks.  One might possess a keen eye for them year-round, yet spy on them with an enhanced interest from about mid-February. They are waiting to begin the nest-building season. From my office window in Lewes I am blessed with an almost nest-eye view of the thirty five-odd pairs which cluster together with Jackdaws in the tops of the tallest trees, apparently waiting for some circadian rhythm to pulse, to pass unseen to human eyes as we struggle along in our frantic races. I call these birds the Southover Rookery.

The Southover Rookery in February - the nests seen were built during the warmest, most confusing December on record

The rooks stoop against late winter rains, hanging from the treetops like great black drips of water, waiting. Taking flight as winter gales roar through the trees, they bend flat-backed into the wind and, with an efficiency of effort, launch away with wings bent like cupid's bow, gliding and wheeling in numbers behind a well-fed kinsman to its happy hunting ground to plunder the worms with their bald faces pressed deep into the turf.

They are fierce birds and, to the Buzzard, they are legion. I have seen no bird stand up to them, yet their smaller Jackdaw cousins are tolerated, bullied, integrated separately but within the rookery. But it is still called 'The Rookery' wherever the two birds are present.

One of the more ironic aspects of watching an urban parliament is that the signs showing the start of nest-building are underfoot on the paving when one walks beneath the turmoil above: thousands of fallen twigs cast like runes on the paving appear in a sudden shower. Look down to understand what is afoot above. We have taken their land and paved it, but they treat it like any other woodland floor. 

For a week or two prior to this the birds sit in the trees, newly paired, and tenderly and quietly occupy the fork of the branch upon which they will construct their nest of twigs and raise their young. As I observe from the office windows, I see one of the pair hop clumsily along the bough to a twig and grasp it between its bill, tearing and tugging it loose, hop back to its mate, but avoiding the lunge of its hostile neighbours. This raucous bird now shows its tender side; together they assess the suitability of the twig as nest material, eye it closely, place it on the fork of the bough. The twig falls, but balances precariously on a lower branch; the owner hops down to where it comes to rest, collects it, returns to the nest-site, repeats its work. The twig falls again, but this time to the road below, littering the pavement.

The following day the birds can be entirely absent. But the very beginning of a proto-nest has appeared in the crook of a bough. Another is close by. They are where I observed the two pairs the previous day. Does this mean they have staked their claim to the tree? Is it now their right in rook-law to return at their leisure and be assured of their place? Dominant above subordinate. Whatever purpose it may serve, a strong wind at this early stage can wipe the trees clean of incomplete nests.

Proto-nests

Proto-nests

The waiting recommences. The pavement may be more or less bare in the morning as I walk into the office and littered with twigs at lunchtime, or I may walk out of work in the evening on a clear path only to return the next morning to the spectacle. From this time of year I begin to pace back and forth expectantly beneath the rookery, looking up; and the sign that it has started is always so clear that one could literally trip over it and, when one does, it has begun.

Above, the birds fly in straight spoke-like lines, chessboard straight, back and forth repeatedly to and from the hub, swooping low over the rooftops with twigs snapped off trees in the gardens at Pelham House and Southover Grange, the Convent Field, the Priory ruins, the Dripping Pan where their namesakes play football, the Railway Land and anywhere else arboreal. Their nests are built from scratch and they appear to prefer green wood to brittle deadwood. Each year, without fail, after the nests begin to take shape, each bird begins to take an interest in their neighbours' nests. Like all the corvid species, the rook is both intelligent and observant. After a while temptation gets the better of it and, while its neighbours are away, it steals a twig from their nest for its own. Time and energy saved! Then it takes another. After a few thefts its own nest is plundered by another observant bird who has cottoned onto the caper. The scheme, the rookery, quickly descends into a melee with pairs of birds screaming from their own nest in defence while attempting to steal from the others, clattering through the trees. The cacophony, the comedy, is an annual rite that I rejoice in whenever I see it.

Throughout the winter, when the previous year's fledglings are shocked by the stark truth that endless autumn days and harvest gleanings are finite, the flock seems subdued. They still wheel and cavort across the sky, mob the buzzard and bully the jackdaws, but they are clearly waiting for something. Today, though, they are nowhere near and I too must wait.