Being Rook

A soundtrack of cawing and mewing crows, rooks and jackdaws accompany winter dawn and dusk in Aberfeldy. I often see a trail of crows, which can take half an hour to pass, flying to roost in a wee plantation just over the river. It’s not just a few birds passing at a time either, there are clouds of them. They mess about as they go, especially the jackdaws who seem to do their best to stir things up amongst the other crows. They don’t seem to be in a hurry to go to bed, perhaps because the nights are so long at this time of year. When they get to the roost there are often crowds of birds birling around in tight formations before they settle on the spruce branches. I hear them at night, bickering quietly, but by then the roost is calm and only a few birds are active. They all seem to get up at once in the morning. Just the right amount of light and they’re off to their daily business.

There was a piece in this Saturday’s Guardian Review by John Burnside, who has just won the TS Eliot prize and the Forward prize for his latest poetry collection, and who was my tutor for a short while, until he took a sabbatical to finish his prize winning collection and a novel, which was short-listed for the Costa. As well as all that he managed to find time to write about creatureliness, i.e. imagining being another creature, in his case a hyena. It was a strange piece, especially in such literary pages, but it got me thinking. Rooks are the animals I think about most in creaturely terms. They seem to enjoy themselves in a stately sort of way, strutting about on fields, poking about for worms. It’s not too much like hard work and they have a good social life. They think too, if birds can be said to think. They’re certainly intelligent and can live a long time, if the gamekeepers don’t get them. You could do worse than be a rook. I did the lino cut after watching a rook annoyed by blowing leaves.