Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 2 (1878).djvu/218

were cut down and the old house demolished, when the Rooks emigrated to a plantation at the back of New Street, Spring Gardens.

In the gardens of Brunswick House, in the New Road, opposite Devonshire Place, a colony of Rooks has been established for some years. I find from my notes that in 1840 there were twenty nests in the plane trees of Brunswick House, and five in the trees overhanging the New Road. In 1858 (an extraordinary mild season), on January 23rd, Rooks were building in the plane trees of Brunswick House fifteen nests. In 1876 I counted seventeen nests. This year, on April 15th, fifteen nests, which now occupy only three of the plane trees nearest the Regent's Park. The tree overhanging the New Road is untenanted, although in 1875 it contained a single nest.

In some plane trees in a garden on the east side of Gower Street are three Rooks' nests, and two others in a plane tree in the garden of No. 5, Gordon Place, Gordon Square.

There was formerly a considerable Rookery in the Temple Gardens, in the elms in the King's Bench Walk.^[1] When they ceased to build there I cannot ascertain exactly. One of the porters tells me that he has been in the Temple, man and boy, between forty and fifty years, and he cannot remember any Rooks or nests there. In Goldsmith's time it was a flourishing colony. In his 'Animated Nature,' printed in 1774, he says:—

"The Rook, as is well known, builds in woods and forests in the neighbourhood of man, and sometimes makes choice of groves in the very midst of cities for the place of its retreat and security: in these it establishes a bond of legal constitutions, by which all intruders are excluded from coming to live among them, and none suffered to build hut acknowledged natives of the place. I have often amused myself with observing their plan of policy

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1. The history of this colony is rather curious. It was founded in Queen Anne's time by Sir Edward Northey, the well-known lawyer of that period, who colonized the place with birds from his estate at Epsom. A bough was cut from a tree with a nest containing two young Kooks, and taken in an open waggon from Epsom to the Temple and fixed to a tree in the gardens. The old birds followed their young and fed them, and they remained and bred there. The following year a Magpie built in the gardens. Her eggs were taken, and those of a Hook were substituted, and in due course were hatched there. " It was a plensant thought," as Leigh Hunt observes, " supposing the colonists had no objection. The Rook is a grave legal bird, both in his coat and habits; living in community, yet to himself, and strongly addicted to discussions of meum and tuinn."—Ed.