Look for rooks!” exhorts the large sign on the corner of our country road. Our neighbour, sheep farmer Geoff, reckons it should be changed to “Look for crooks!” That might be more useful. Although given the secretive nature of crookery, you imagine a crook might be as hard to look for as a rook.
Altering the sign is a very funny idea and one I briefly entertained. But if you were caught by the cops you would be the crook.
The sign handily includes a depiction of a rook. Handily because I had no idea what a rook looked like. Now I know. A rook looks like what you imagine a crook would look like if a crook happened to be a bird. It has a menacing beak and beady mean eyes.
There is a speech bubble on the sign. The rook is saying, “kaa!” This might be social profiling, but I infer that should you come across a suspicious character with a menacing beak and beady mean eyes lurking beneath your bed in the middle of the night and it is saying, “kaa!”, you have spotted a crook impersonating a rook.
All of this is well and good but if you have looked for and spotted a rook what are you then supposed to do? We live in the country. Country people have guns. Country people, when they spot a crook, one under the bed with beady eyes, might well shoot them.
A rook really is a right rotter, apparently. A rook posing as a crook, or vice versa, steals crops. Thus rooks are crooks. According to the Greater Wellington Regional Council, which is on a mission to eradicate rooks, they do so stealthily. A bloke from the council told a local paper rooks start from the middle of a crop and work their way out. “A landowner may not notice the damage until the outer seeds have begun to germinate and they’re left with empty soil and the cost of having to resow.”
What bastards. Rural folk are urged not to attempt to approach the crooks on their own but to call a hotline.
In the unlikely event I find a rook at Lush Places in the middle of the night hiding under the bed going “kaa!”, I won’t be calling the hotline. I will hide in the cupboard and hope that one of the cats is brave enough to take on a rook. This is unlikely. They will probably be hiding in the cupboard with me. A rook is a nasty thing.
A nice thing, a spring thing, is a pot of flowering auriculas.
A pot of auriculas is a precious thing. Mine was a present from a fellow gardener. The flowers are tiny, they hang down shyly above waxy leaves. They are as exquisite as a flower fashioned by a Fabergé jeweller. The Victorians went mad for them. They displayed them in “theatres” with mock velvet curtains.
I once attempted such a display by asking my mad Uncle Chris, an avid attendee at the Men’s Shed, to make me such a theatre. He met me on the platform of Wellington Railway Station hefting the thing. It was enormous.
Mad Uncle Chris is an impetuous and enthusiastic fellow. He hadn’t waited for me to supply measurements. But he is immeasurably generous, so who could complain? Somehow, he persuaded the train driver to let us stash it in the luggage car.
Then came a tragedy. Before I could move my little pots of auriculas into the theatre, the chickens ate most of them.
In a competition between rooks and chickens for the title of “most evil of birds”, our chickens would win. We have a sign that reads: “Look for chickens!” You have been warned.
