and all the creatures which inhabit it that they have in their goodness
left us this one. For it is something to have a rook, although he is not
a great bird compared with the great ones lost--bustard and kite and
raven and goshawk, and many others. His abundance on the cultivated
downs is rather strange when one remembers the outcry made against him
in some parts on account of his injurious habits; but here it appears
the sentiment in his favour is just as strong in the farmer, or in a
good many farmers, as in the great landlord. The biggest rookery I know
on Salisbury Plain is at a farm-house where the farmer owns the land
himself and cultivates about nine hundred acres. One would imagine that
he would keep his rooks down in these days when a boy cannot be hired to
scare the birds from the crops.

One day, near West Knoyle, I came upon a vast company of rooks busily
engaged on a ploughed field where everything short of placing a
bird-scarer on the ground had been done to keep the birds off. A score
of rooks had been shot and suspended to long sticks planted about the
field, and there were three formidable-looking men of straw and rags
with hats on their heads and wooden guns under their arms. But the rooks
were there all the same; I counted seven at one spot, prodding the earth
close to the feet of one of the scarecrows. I went into the field to see
what they were doing, and found that it was sown with vetches, just
beginning to come up, and the birds were digging the seed up.

Three months later, near the same spot, on Mere Down, I found these
birds feasting on the corn, when it had been long cut but could not be
carried on account of the wet weather. It was a large field of fifty to
sixty acres, and as I walked by it the birds came flying leisurely over
my head to settle with loud cawings on the stocks. It was a magnificent
sight--the great, blue-black bird-forms on the golden wheat, an animated