Monday, June 13, 2011
A READER writes to tells me he recently picked up six dead crows beneath a rookery near his home.
They had been shot. It is still, of course, the nesting season. It beggars belief that anyone could be so heartless as to slaughter parent birds when they are feeding their young which will, as a result, starve. It is equally callous to shoot birds just fledged and not yet capable of flight.
An EU Council Directive of 1979 prohibits the hunting of wild birds within the period of migration or reproduction. Apparently the Garda were well aware of this and when the dastardly deed was brought to their notice they "had words" with the perpetrator, who undertook not to do it again. He had killed the birds because they had been waking him up in the morning, he said.
My reader also told me, as a young man, he had shot a rook and when he picked it up nine leatherjackets fell out of its craw. Knowing that leatherjackets devastate grass roots on lawns — and also attack potatoes, strawberries, cabbages and lettuce — he vowed that he would never shoot a rook again.
In 1935 Lord’s Cricket Ground in London was so infested with leatherjackets — they created bald patches near the wicket which resulted in the ball taking on unprecedented spin. Ground staff scoured the turf and collected thousands which were afterwards burnt. Not a lot of Daddy Longlegs at Lord’s that year!
I read in the entry for rooks in British Birds and Their Nests, by Frank Finn, BA, published 1910, that "The male feeds the female assiduously when on the nest, and both are very attentive to the young when hatched, and display great distress when the young are shot down, a practice which is followed in many localities when the young have left the nest, but are not yet old enough to fly away from it. The shooting is done with a special small gun known as a ‘rook-rifle’ and the game killed is converted into pies, young Rooks being the only birds of the Crow tribe which are eaten in England, though on the Continent the adult Hooded Crow is largely killed, when on migration, for use as food."
This comes as a surprise to me. Could the "four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" have been fledgling rooks rather than our familiar birds of the thrush family with the golden bills? Rooks are ‘black birds’, too, but the line, "When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing" rules out the harsh-voiced crows altogether. The 1744 rhyme read "Four and twenty Naughty Boys/ Baked in a Pye".
An Italian cookbook of 1529 provides a recipe "to make pies so that birds may be alive in them and flie out when it is cut up". At the wedding of Marie de Medici and Henry IV of France in 1600, "The first surprise came ... when the guests sat down, unfolded their napkins and saw songbirds fly out."
Meanwhile, it has been unkindly suggested that we fatten our domestic heron and enjoy an unusual Christmas dinner. Herons were eaten in 15th century England when they were hawked with peregrine falcons. However, we have no intention of consuming Ron, as he is known to the young people, even though by Christmas, if he continues to eat at the present rate, he will weigh as much as a goose. In the 1990s, along with some members of the West Cork Birdwatching Society, I ate a swan which had come to grief when it flew into power lines. If we hadn’t eaten it, foxes would have. It was beefy in flavour, perhaps because swans graze. But herons live on fish.
This Ron now struts about our garden like an articulated farmyard chicken. He squawks for his food as if speaking to us, and gulps down fish, heads, bones and all. Afterwards, he whitewashes the sides of his roost which, happily, is usually a favourite bush, where it can’t be seen. I imagine these excretions are pure bone meal and would do the garden no harm, if well aimed. We try to reduce the food we give him daily but still haven’t persuaded him to take to the wild. However, he now sometimes stays away for 16 hours at a time, so there is hope!
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