Many farmers dislike them, but crows are one of the great spectacles of winter
Nicola Chester is the author of Richard Jefferies Award-winning and Wainwright Prize Highly Commended book On Gallows Down.
OPINION
Almost every village has its rookery (the mixed roosts of rooks and jackdaws), or a farm or lane named after them.
In the shorter days of winter, the birds’ movements match ours, on their daily commutes to feed in the fields, before returning at dusk in large, garrulous flocks at a ‘pre-roost’ to share information before bed.
After a moment of silence (like an indrawn breath), the flock moves off with a seashore roar to the roost. There, they whirl like loosed leaves against the white winter sky, sometimes in a vortex of snow, before falling in and settling. Rookeries can be ancestral and, from the crow’s nests on tall trees’ masts, the birds oversee much and enjoy commenting on it.
‘Crow’ has long been an interchangeable term for those birds with the confident corvid bounce and intelligent swagger, their feathers a mixed alchemy of oils and mirror gloss. But carrion crows tend to a solitariness, unlike communal-living rooks and jackdaws.
As a group, ‘crows’ divide opinion. Strutting frost-crusted plough, flipping over cowpats and scattering dung in search of grubs, or riding the backs of sheep, picking off ticks, they are a key part of our rural heritage.
They will eat newly seed-drilled cereals, root crops (including potatoes), fruit from orchards and animal feed. Quick to exploit opportunities, they eat bird’s eggs and chicks, small mammals and reptiles, if they can. Carrion crows sometimes take the eggs and young of ground-nesting birds, such as lapwing or curlew (which can be hard to witness, given those birds’ ‘red’ conservation status) and livestock can be harried, too. Corvids are capable of targeting the soft parts of a vulnerable sheep or lamb, pecking out the eyes or tongue – and a stricken animal is hugely distressing to come across.
But they also clear up carrion and eat soil invertebrates, wireworms and leatherjackets (cranefly larvae, which eat grass roots and can be seen as a pest in large numbers, if large numbers exist anymore).
Attitudes to our crow family vary widely among farmers and rural workers. Some experience difficult levels of dam
