Rooks

There's a large rook colony in the park across the road. When you're among so many rooks everyday, you start noticing all sorts of things about them - the variety of their rough calls, their anarchic social behaviours, how they swagger across the grass, how they hurl themselves with wild abandon into the wind. I once watched a rook pick up a flattened Coke can and angle it to flash the sunlight for the amusement of an audience of gathered rooks. Rooks do what they must do to survive. The rest of the time they have fun.

"They came in widely spaced drifts like showers of black blossom, their movements wild and playful, the calls incessant. The mood was electric, exhilirating. It felt as if the change of seasons was happening before my very eyes and, in a sense, it was. I didn't try to make notes. It was too uncontrollable, too wild to contain. I simply stood back and watched" ~ Mark Cocker, Crow Country

"In our midst, a shape-shifter, a smallish, smooth-feathered glossy rook one moment, a strutting, baggy-feathered, almost large, self-important, angry one the next" ~ Esther Woolfson, Corvus: A Life With Birds

His wings are the stiff back of his only book,

Himself the only page - of solid ink.

~ Ted Hughes, Crowego

Photographing rooks

Sometimes I use a long telephoto lens but mostly I don't bother. The rooks around here are used to people and dogs milling around so you can get fairly close to them. They're also used to me pointing a camera at them because I've been photographing them for a couple of years now. And it helps if you speak to them and then just get on with taking the shot. Speaking to them seems to break some tension of suspicion - I don't know why but it works for me.

If you want crisp, sharp pictures you need a fast lens and a quick shutter speed. But I like motion blur too so I often use a medium to high f-stop to slow the shutter (see the top photograph).