Rookery Wood

Rookery Wood - Cameos of Birdlife #2

Not far from where I used to live as a child (see photo in the previous post), close by the village church ¹ there was a rookery. I would often stay out, well past my bedtime, watching and listening, until all the sounds of the day had faded away; and there was just the stillness before night ...

nightfall 
the rookery hushed 
- bedtime

The daylight has lingered on longer than expected, but now the gloom of the short January evening is settling down fast in the wood. ... There rises a loud though distant clamour of rooks and daws, who have restlessly moved in their roost-trees. Darkness is almost on them, yet they cannot quite settle. The cawing and dawing rises to a pitch, and then declines; the wood is silent, and it is suddenly night.

From - January in the Sussex Woods - Richard Jefferies

For more beautiful writing on Rooks - Tish Farrell (Writer on the Edge) has written a wonderful series of posts about the rookery behind her house.

And now it really is bedtime.

Notes

The header image is from an original watercolour - ‘A Parliament of Rooks’ by Winifred Marie Louise Austen, 1876 - 1964

Winifred Maria Louise Austen (1876 - 1964) - was an English illustrator, painter, etcher and aquatint engraver. She was widely admired and collected; even the naturalist Sir Peter Scott – himself so able a wildlife artist – said Austen was, ‘certainly the best bird-etcher of this (last) century’.

Citation

The recording in this post is used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 license. This and many more can be found at - Xeno-Canto

1. St Mary’s Church Timsbury. The name of Timsbury means a wooded vale, a fortified place. It is believed to have Anglo-Saxon origins, and was mentioned in the Doomsday Book. In 1614 the village consisted of about 50 dwellings most of them around the church and Church Lane.