The woods are lovely, dark and deep

I WROTE last week about standing at the foot of an old wood, near Timoleague, one bright morning, watching flights of dunlin over the bay.

The wood is called Cilmanistir, the wood of the monastery; whether it was planted by the monks at the 12th century Cistercian foundation at nearby Abbeymahon, or by the Franciscans in the 13th century monastery at nearby Timoleague, I don’t know. Perhaps St Molaga, the seventh century holy man who founded Timoleague, planted it.

The following evening, passing the same spot in the darkening light, I saw two or three thousand rooks standing in a long, shadowy line in a field on the other side of the bay. Soon after the last, late stragglers had flown in across the empty sky, regiments of the line began to rise and take to the air, sweeping across the bay towards the bare trees above me, carpets of rooks, furling and unfurling, climbing and falling.

At the wood, the flock turned and climbed higher as another battalion launched itself from the field and swirled out over the water below them, and, soon, all the thousands were aloft, flying hither and thither on planes of air, black patterns against the sky, breathtaking in their complexity.

It was an east wind that evening, cold and raw. As they flew, they raised their voices in a clamour of metallic sounds, a sort of massed, triumphal cry that somehow seemed as old as the wood itself, if sounds can be old. The abbey will have heard them before; for millennia, generations of these Cilmanistir rooks have echoed against its walls.

They had the sky to themselves, this army. It’s appropriate that crows fly at night. In the morning, the pale breasts of the dunlin gathered and flashed in the sunlight; in the evening, the silhouettes of rooks deepened the dark.

A man in the village says there is a king or queen rook, whose voice rises above the others and is heard and obeyed. The flock settles in the wood and the parliament, briefly but raucously, debates until he orders. “Silence now, my feathered friends, settle down for the night,” and they do.

All bickering, wrangling and gossip stops. The wood falls silent, and one would never guess that it houses two thousand sleeping rooks. I wonder if, in the morning, the same chief rook sounds the reveille, and, like an army general, sends out scouts and foraging parties to all points of the compass based on reports received the evening before.

In the morning, in the semi-dark (my wife sees them on the way to work), the flock disperses, 50 going that way, 100 the other, 100 to 20 degrees 20 minutes south, 100 to 15 degrees 30 seconds north. They explore all cardinal points, all degrees and minutes of the compass.

Perhaps the evening caw-cophony over the bay is crow communication, each skein of birds reporting on the success or failure of its expedition, on the plentitude or paucity of feeding in the area where it spent the day, and the chief rook then plans the campaign for the morrow, ensuring all members of his tribe share provisions with the flock.

There is a single, old rook (it has a ragged-trousered look and baldness about the beak) that lives beside the wood and doesn’t travel, competing with the gulls and the ducks when people feed them bread. Perhaps he’s the chief, too old for long-distance surveys, his wisdom too valuable to risk. Staying close to his kingdom of the wood, each evening he waits for the tribe to report home.

At Coomalacha, on the Seven Heads in mid-January, the ravens were building their nest. A gorse bush was in bloom. I picked a flower and threw it over the cliff where our beloved old dog plunged to her death last year. The petals blew back, caught in the updraft. Five choughs, jet black, drifted by on the wind over the winter fields and the restless sea.