Rooks are a wonderful, if inescapable, part of my daily life. At the north end of the village there are at least four rookeries to be found high in the trees, and our home is sandwiched between two of them. The power of their cawing choir is astonishing as they call to both greet and bid goodbye to the daylight.
They seem happy in all weather but my favourite is their aerial display in squalling winds where their sheer number can obliterate the sky. Last year, whilst walking in a neighbouring village, I witnessed two rooks working in tandem to force a much larger buzzard to beat a hasty retreat. They circled the sky and screamed out in victory.
Yet, as I write this blog post in the early afternoon, their call is currently absent from the sky. For today, the local farmer is harvesting potatoes and I spotted a group of twenty or more rooks sat along a power cable by the field, waiting in anticipation to gobble up any insects or worms uncovered during the harvesting process.
I am not sure how destructive rooks are to crops, but over a hundred years ago children were paid a penny a day to scare the birds off the fields. Some would fashion homemade 'clappers' from three pieces of wood which when waved about made a loud noise to scare the birds away. There is a George Ewart Evans recording of a Suffolk woman recalling the song she sang whilst rook scaring that goes something like "Here come my clappers to knock you down backwards, here come my clappers to break your backbone." She would then howl a "Hallacawoo" at them. I heard the recording a few years ago, but due the the cyber attack on the British Library the files cannot be currently accessed. Hopefully the recordings will be restored for they give a wonderful account of life in Suffolk in the 1950s. There is no record i have found to suggest that clappers were used in Holbrook, but I think I might fashion myself a pair to test their effectiveness.
[Bird scarer clapper - Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum, Europe - CC BY-NC-SA.
Rooks have featured in my previous podcast recordings, but on the recording below they take centre stage during a recent thunderstorm. Late one Sunday afternoon, I could hear the sound of thunder in the distance. In anticipation I grabbed my recording kit and set up in a covered area of my patio. For a few minutes the rooks cried hullabaloo before quieting down. Were they anticipating that the storm was moving our way? Who can say, but this recording captures how around each clap of thunder they cry havoc before heavy rain drowns them out.
[This field recording was recorded to showcase the natural sounds heard in a rural setting. It features no human voices (other than my own in the background along with some coughing). No monies will be made from the recording. Please contact me  if you have any concerns]
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