CHAPTER V

EXPULSION OF THE ROOKS

Positions of the rook and crow compared--Gray's Inn Gardens rookery--Break-up of the old, and futile attempt of the birds to establish new rookeries--The rooks a great loss to London--Why the rook is esteemed--Incidents in the life of a tame rook--A first sight of the Kensington Gardens rookery--The true history of the expulsion of the rooks--A desolate scene, and a vision of London beautified.

We have seen how it is with the carrion crow--that he is in the balance, and that if the park authorities will but refrain from persecuting him he will probably be able to keep his ancient place among the wild birds of London. To what has already been said on the subject of this bird I will only add here that there is, just now, an unfortunate inclination in some of the County Council's parks to adopt the policy of the royal parks--to set too high a value on domestic and ornamental water-fowl, which, however beautiful and costly they may be, can never give as much pleasure or produce the same effect on the mind as the wild bird. The old London crow is worth more to London than many exotic swans and ducks and geese.

We have also seen that the case of the jackdaw is not quite hopeless; for although the birds are now reduced to an insignificant remnant, the habits and disposition of this species make it reasonable to hope that they will thrive and increase, and, in any case, that if we want the daw we can have him. But the case of the rook appears to me well nigh hopeless, and on this account, in this list of the corvines, he is put last that should have been first. There are nevertheless two reasons why a considerable space--a whole chapter--should be given to this species: one is, that down to within a few years ago the rook attracted the largest share of attention, and was the most important species in the wild bird life of the metropolis; the other, that it would be well that the cause of its departure should not be forgotten. It is true that in the very heart of the metropolis a rookery still exists in Gray's Inn Gardens, and that although it does not increase neither does it diminish. Thus, during the last twenty years there have never been fewer than seventeen or eighteen, and never more than thirty nests in a season; and for the last three seasons the numbers have been twenty-five, twenty-three, and twenty-four nests. Going a little farther back in the history of this ancient famous colony, it is well to relate that, twenty-three years ago, it was well-nigh lost for ever through an unconsidered act of the Benchers, or of some ignorant person in authority among them. It was thought that the trees would have a better appearance if a number of their large horizontal branches were lopped off, and the work was carried out in the month of March, just when the rooks were busy repairing their old and building new nests. The birds were seized with panic, and went away in a body to be seen no more for the space of three years; then they returned to settle once more, and at present they are regarded with so much pride and affection by the Benchers, and have so much food cast to them out of scores of windows, that they have grown to be the most domestic and stay-at-home rooks to be found anywhere in England.

With the exception of this one small colony, it is sad to have to say that utter, irretrievable disaster has fallen on the inner London rookeries--those that still exist in the suburbs will be mentioned in subsequent chapters--and although rooks may still be found within our gates, go they will and go they must, never to return. The few birds that continue in constantly diminishing numbers to breed here and there in the metropolis, in spite of its gloomy atmosphere and the long distances they are obliged to travel in quest of grubs and worms for their young, are London rooks, themselves hatched in parks and squares--the town has always been their home and breeding place; and although it is more than probable that some of these town birds are from time to time enticed away to the country, it is indeed hard to believe that rooks hatched in the rural districts are ever tempted to come to us. During the last dozen years many attempts at founding new colonies have been made by small bands of rooks. These birds were and are survivors of the old broken-up communities. All these incipient rookeries, containing from two or three to a dozen nests (as at Connaught Square), have failed; but the birds, or some of them, still wander about in an aimless way in small companies, from park to park, and there is no doubt that year by year these homeless rooks will continue to decrease in number, until the ancient tradition is lost, and they will be seen no more.

It is no slight loss which we have to lament; it is the loss to the millions inhabiting this city, or congeries of cities and towns, of a bird which is more to us than any other wild bird, on account of its large size and interesting social habits, its high intelligence, and the confidence it reposes in man; and, finally, of that ancient kindly regard and pride in it which, in some degree, is felt by all persons throughout the kingdom. The rook has other claims to our esteem and affection which are not so generally known: in a domestic state it is no whit behind other species in the capacity for strong attachments, in versatility and playfulness, and that tricksy spirit found in most of the corvines, which so curiously resembles, or simulates, the sense of humour in ourselves.

I recall here an incident in the life of a tame rook, and by way of apology for introducing it I may mention that this bird, although country bred, was of London too, when his mistress came to town for the season accompanied by her glossy black pet. I will first relate something of his country life, and feel confident that this digression will be pardoned by those of my readers who are admirers of the rook, a bird which we are accustomed to regard as of a more sedate disposition than the jackdaw.

He was picked up injured in a park in Oxfordshire, taken in and nursed by the lady of the house until he was well and able to fly about once more; but he elected to stay with his benefactress, although he always spent a portion of each day in flying about the country in company with his fellows. He had various ways of showing his partiality for his mistress, one of which was very curious. Early every morning he flew into her bedroom by the open window, and alighting on her bed would deposit a small offering on the pillow--a horse-chestnut bur, a little crooked stick, a bleached rabbit bone, a pebble, a bit of rusty iron, which he had picked up and regarded as a suitable present. Whatever it was, it had to be accepted with demonstrations of gratitude and affection. If she took no notice he would lift it up and replace it again, calling attention to it with little subdued exclamations which sounded like words, and if she feigned sleep he would gently pull her hair or tap her cheek with his bill to awake her. Once the present was accepted he would nestle in under her arm and remain so, very contentedly, until she got up.

Here we get a delightful little peep into the workings of the rook's mind. We ourselves, our great philosopher tells us, are 'hopelessly' anthropomorphic. The rook appears to be in as bad a case; to his mind we are nothing but bigger rooks, somewhat misshapen, perhaps, featherless, deprived by some accident of the faculty of flight, and not very well able to take care of ourselves.

One summer day the rook came into the daughter's bedroom, where she was washing her hands, and had just taken off a valuable diamond ring from her finger and placed it on the marble top of the washing-stand. The rook came to the stand and very suddenly picked up the ring and flew out at the open window. The young lady ran down stairs and on to the terrace, calling out that the bird had flown away with her ring. Her mother quickly came out with a field glass in her hand, and together they watched the bird fly straight away across the park to a distance of about a third of a mile, where he disappeared from sight among the trees. The ring was gone! Two hours later the robber returned and flew into the dining-room, where his mistress happened to be; alighting on the table, he dropped the ring from his beak and began walking round it, viewing it first with one, then the other eye, uttering the while a variety of little complacent notes, in which he seemed to be saying: 'I have often admired this beautiful ring, but never had an opportunity of examining it properly before; now, after having had it for some time in my possession and shown it to several wild rooks of my acquaintance, I have much satisfaction in restoring it to its owner, who is my very good friend.'

During his summer visits to London this rook met with many curious and amusing adventures, as he had the habit of flying in at the open windows of houses in the neighbourhood of Park Lane, and making himself very much at home. He also flew about Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens every day to visit his fellow-rooks. One day his mistress was walking in the Row, at an hour when it was full of fashionable people, and the rook, winging his way homewards from the gardens, spied her, and circling down alighted on her shoulders, to the amazement of all who witnessed the incident. 'What an astonishing thing!' exclaimed some person in the crowd that gathered round her. 'Oh, not at all,' answered the lady, caressing the bird with her hand, while he rubbed his beak against her cheek; 'if you were as fond of the birds as I am, and treated them as well, they would be glad to come down on to your shoulders, too.'

This happened when the now vanished rooks had their populous rookery in Kensington Gardens, where they were to be seen all day flying to and from the old nesting-trees, and stalking over the green turf in search of grubs on the open portions of Hyde Park. And we should have had them there now if they had not been driven out.

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The two largest London rookeries were those at Greenwich Park and Kensington Gardens. In the first-named the trees were all topped over twenty years ago, with the result that the birds left; and although the locality has much to attract them, and numbers of rooks constantly visit the park, they have never attempted to build nests since the trees were mutilated. This rookery I never saw; that of Kensington Gardens I knew very well.

Over twenty years ago, on arriving in London, I put up at a City hotel, and on the following day went out to explore, and walked at random, never inquiring my way of any person, and not knowing whether I was going east or west. After rambling about for some three or four hours, I came to a vast wooded place where few persons were about. It was a wet, cold morning in early May, after a night of incessant rain; but when I reached this unknown place the sun shone out and made the air warm and fragrant and the grass and trees sparkle with innumerable raindrops. Never grass and trees in their early spring foliage looked so vividly green, while above the sky was clear and blue as if I had left London leagues behind. As I advanced farther into this wooded space the dull sounds of traffic became fainter, while ahead the continuous noise of many cawing rooks grew louder and louder. I was soon under the rookery listening to and watching the birds as they wrangled with one another, and passed in and out among the trees or soared above their tops. How intensely black they looked amidst the fresh brilliant green of the sunlit foliage! What wonderfully tall trees were these where the rookery was placed! It was like a wood where the trees were self-planted, and grew close together in charming disorder, reaching a height of about one hundred feet or more. Of the fine sights of London so far known to me, including the turbid, rushing Thames, spanned by its vast stone bridges, the cathedral with its sombre cloud-like dome, and the endless hurrying procession of Cheapside, this impressed me the most. The existence of so noble a transcript of wild nature as this tall wood with its noisy black people, so near the heart of the metropolis, surrounded on all sides by miles of brick and mortar and innumerable smoking chimneys, filled me with astonishment; and I may say that I have seldom looked on a scene that stamped itself on my memory in more vivid and lasting colours. Recalling the sensations of delight I experienced then, I can now feel nothing but horror at the thought of the unspeakable barbarity the park authorities were guilty of in destroying this noble grove. _Why_ was it destroyed? It was surely worth more to us than many of our possessions--many painted canvases, statues, and monuments, which have cost millions of the public money! Of brick and stone buildings, plain and ornamental, we have enough to afford shelter to our bodies, and for all other purposes, but trees of one or two centuries' growth, the great trees that give shelter and refreshment to the soul, are not many in London. There must, then, have been some urgent reason and necessity for the removal of this temple not builded by man. It could not surely have been for the sake of the paltry sum which the wood was worth--paltry, that is to say, if we compare the amount the timber-merchant would pay for seven hundred elm-trees with the sum of seventy-five thousand pounds the Government gave, a little later, for half a dozen dreary canvases from Blenheim--dust and ashes for the hungry and thirsty! Those who witnessed the felling of these seven hundred trees, the tallest in London, could but believe that the authorities had good cause for what they did, that they had been advised by experts in forestry; and it was vaguely thought that the trees, which looked outwardly in so flourishing a condition, were inwardly eaten up with canker, and would eventually (and very soon perhaps) have to come down. If the trees had in very truth been dying, the authorities would not have been justified in their action. In the condition in which trees are placed in London it is well nigh impossible that they should have perfect health; but trees take long to die, and during decay are still beautiful. Not far from London is a tree which Aubrey described as very old in his day, and which has been dying since the early years of this century, but it is not dead yet, and it may live to be admired by thousands of pilgrims down to the end of the twentieth century. In any case, trees are too precious in London to be removed because they are unsound. But the truth was, those in Kensington Gardens were not dying and not decayed. The very fact that they were chosen year after year by the rooks to build upon afforded the strongest evidence that they were the healthiest trees in the gardens. When they were felled a majority of them were found to be perfectly sound. I examined many of the finest boles, seventy and eighty feet long, and could detect no rotten spot in them, nor at the roots.

The only reasons I have been able to discover as having been given for the destruction were that grass could not be made to grow so as to form a turf in the deep shade of the grove; that in wet weather, particularly during the fall of the leaf, the ground was always sloppy and dirty under the trees, so that no person could walk in that part of the grounds without soiling his boots.

It will hardly be credited that the very men who did the work, before setting about it, respectfully informed the park authorities that they considered it would be a great mistake to cut the trees down, not only because they were sound and beautiful to the eye, but for other reasons. One was that the rooks would be driven away; another that this tall thick grove was a protection to the gardens, and secured the trees scattered over its northern side from the violence of the winds from the west. They were laughed at for their pains, and told that the 'screen' was not wanted, as every tree was made safe by its own roots; and as to the rooks, they would not abandon the gardens where they had bred for generations, but would build new nests on other trees. Finally, when it came to the cutting down, the men begged to be allowed to spare a few of the finest trees in the grove; and at last one tree, with no fewer than fourteen nests on it: they were sharply ordered to cut down the lot. And cut down they were, with disastrous consequences, as we know, as during the next few years many scores of the finest trees on the north side of the gardens were blown down by the winds, among them the noblest tree in London--the great beech on the east side of the wide vacant space where the grove had stood. The rooks, too, went away, as they had gone before from Greenwich Park, and as in a period of seventeen years they have not succeeded in establishing a new rookery, we may now regard them as lost for ever.

Seventeen years! Some may say that this is going too far back; that in these fast-moving times, crowded with historically important events, it is hardly worth while in 1898 to recall the fact that in 1880 a grove of seven hundred trees was cut down in Kensington Gardens for no reason whatever, or for a reason which would not be taken seriously by any person in any degree removed from the condition of imbecility!

To the nation at large the destruction of this grove may not have been an important event, but to the millions inhabiting the metropolis, who in a sense form a nation in themselves, it was exceedingly important, immeasurably more so than most of the events recorded each year in the 'Annual Register.'

It must be borne in mind that to a vast majority of this population of five millions London is a permanent home, their 'province covered with houses' where they spend their toiling lives far from the sights and sounds of nature; that the conditions being what they are, an open space is a possession of incalculable value, to be prized above all others, like an amulet or a thrice-precious gem containing mysterious health-giving properties. He, then, who takes from London one of these sacred possessions, or who deprives it of its value by destroying its rural character, by cutting down its old trees and driving out its bird life, inflicts the greatest conceivable injury on the community, and is really a worse enemy than the criminal who singles out an individual here and there for attack, and who for his misdeeds is sent to Dartmoor or to the gallows.

We give praise and glory to those who confer lasting benefits on the community; we love their memories when they are no more, and cherish their fame, and hand it on from generation to generation. In honouring them we honour ourselves. But praise and glory would be without significance, and love of our benefactors would lose its best virtue, its peculiar sweetness, if such a feeling did not have its bitter opposite and correlative.

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In conclusion of this in part mournful chapter I will relate a little experience met with in Kensington Gardens, seventeen years ago. I was in bad health at the time, with no prospect of recovery, and had been absent from London. It was a bright and beautiful morning in October, the air summer-like in its warmth, and, thinking how pleasant my favourite green and wooded haunt would look in the sunshine, I paid a visit to Kensington Gardens. Then I first saw the great destruction that had been wrought; where the grove had stood there was now a vast vacant space, many scores of felled trees lying about, and all the ground trodden and black, and variegated with innumerable yellow chips, which formed in appearance an irregular inlaid pattern.

As I stood there idly contemplating the sawn-off half of a prostrate trunk, my attention was attracted to a couple of small, ragged, shrill-voiced urchins, dancing round the wood and trying to get bits of bark and splinters off, one with a broken chopper for an implement, the other with a small hand-hatchet, which flew off the handle at every stroke. Seeing that I was observing their antics, one shouted to the other, 'Say, Bill, got a penny?' 'No, don't I wish I had!' shouted the other.

'Little beggars,' thought I, 'do you really imagine you are going to get a penny out of me?' So much amused was I at their transparent device that I deliberately winked an eye--not at the urchins, but for the benefit of a carelessly dressed, idle-looking young woman who happened to be standing near just then, regarding us with an expression of slight interest, a slight smile on her rosy lips, the sunshine resting on her beautiful sun-browned face, and tawny bronzed hair. I must explain that I had met her before, often and often, in London and other towns, and in the country, and by the sea, and on distant seas, and in many uninhabited places, so that we were old friends and quite familiar.

Presently an exceedingly wasted, miserable-looking, decrepid old woman came by, bent almost double under a ragged shawl full of sticks and brushwood which she had gathered where the men were now engaged in lopping off the branches of a tree they had just felled. 'My! she's got a load, ain't she, Bill?' cried the first urchin again. 'Oh, if we had a penny, now!'

I asked him what he meant, and very readily and volubly he explained that on payment of a penny the workmen would allow any person to take away as much of the waste wood as he could carry, but without the penny not a chip. I relented at that and gave them a penny, and with a whoop of joy at their success they ran off to where the men were working.

Then I turned to leave the gardens, nodding a good-bye to the young woman, who was still standing there. The slight smile and expression of slight interest, that curious baffling expression with which she regards all our actions, from the smallest to the greatest, came back to her lips and face. But as she returned my glance with her sunny eyes, behind the sunniness on the surface there was a look of deep meaning, such as I have occasionally seen in them before. It seemed to be saying sorrowful and yet comforting things to me, telling me not to grieve overmuch at these hackings and mutilations of the sweet places of the earth--at these losses to be made good. It was as if she had shown me a vision of some far time, after this London, after the dust of all her people, from park ranger to bowed-down withered old woman gathering rotten rain-sodden sticks for fuel, had been blown about by the winds of many centuries--a vision of old trees growing again on this desecrated spot as in past ages, oak and elm, and beech and chestnut, the happy, green homes of squirrel and bird and bee. It was very sweet to see London beautified and made healthy at last! And I thought, quoting Hafiz, that after a thousand years my bones would be filled with gladness, and, uprising, dance in the sepulchre.