Word: rooke
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...when they are planning murder, fraud and forgery, or saying aloud the thoughts that living people are most careful not to say. They do their grim talking in dining rooms and nurseries which the author hardly ever describes, but which Critic Edward Sack-ville-West has neatly termed "embowered, rook-enchanted concentration camps." The persevering reader will find that the sum total of all this artifice, melodrama and incredible behavior is a warm, witty, profoundly tragic portrait of married and family life...
...affair of the rooks was much graver and tempers accordingly rose higher. The British rook (Corvus frugilegus) is a black, glossy, gregarious bird of the crow family, closely resembling the U.S. crow, old Corvus brachyrhynchos, some of whose unpleasant habits it shares (e.g., eating eggs from other birds' nests). But there are those who love it. And the Ministry of Agriculture & Fisheries had decided that there were too many rooks. It urged county committees to shoot 80% of them...
Here & there, shooting parties got to work last week, but amid a bedlam of protest. In a tight-lipped editorial, the Times pointed out that, although rooks eat 26,000 tons of grain a year, they pay their way by eating 7,000 tons of harmful insects. Others recalled the rook's niche in British song & story. Cawed the poet laureate, John Masefield himself: "For how long is this proposed slaughter to continue? Who is to check the killers? Who is to decide when enough blood has been shed...
...battle boiled up into the House of Commons, where Minister of Agriculture & Fisheries Thomas Williams was peppered with questions. Said he: "There was and is no intention of reducing the national rook population by heavy and indiscriminate slaughter all over the country." But rook-loving M.P.s were not mollified. Said one: "Is the Minister aware that it is inhumane to destroy birds while they are nesting?" Answered the Minister: "I shall need to make further inquiries...
Worst of all, a callous News Chronicle reporter suggested a recipe for rook pie.* So far, however, rooks were proving just as hard to hit as ever. As John Gay, another British poet, had put it: "To shoot at crows is powder flung away...