[All pictures of garden wildlife on this page are thumbnails. Click on any thumbnail for a large format to be displayed.]

Rook (Corvus frugilegus)

Clickhere for the bird's sound.

For people in the part of Holland I live in this bird is a kind of mystery. You can find it everywhere. It's a colony bird and all villages in the vicinity here have a colony. The animals show no fear of people, neither do they pay any attention to what people do (one of the colonies in Lochem, where over a 1,000 of these birds live, is in the middle of a very busy industrial area). Yet this is a protected bird and it is even on the European List of Endangered Species. Every now and then a member of the Crow family will visit the lawn in my back garden and this year (1998), for the first time, I noticed a Rook.

This bird belongs to the family of Crows (Corvidae). It is very rare in our garden and can be seen in Holland all year round. The bird is 18" and weighs 480 grams. It lives in countryside mostly. It eats insects, mice and buds. The sexes do not differ from one another. The nests are used all year round, but the three to six eggs are laid from March till May. It takes the eggs 17 to 20 days to hatch and the hatchling remain in their nest for 32 (!) days.