Mistletoe and Rooks

December 24, 2024December 23, 2024 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 3 Comments

I wish I could tell you there’s a legend about rooks and mistletoe. After all, there are many beliefs surrounding mistletoe, with their origins in Druid, Roman, and Norse legends. It wasn’t until the 1700s in the UK that people took to kissing under sprigs of mistletoe at Christmas time.

Note: Kissing rooks under the mistletoe is not recommended, no matter how much eggnog you’ve consumed.

The connection between mistletoe and rooks exists only (as far as I can tell) in my own corvid-obsessed brain.

When we visited the UK in the spring of this year, I had several bird-watching goals, one of which was to see some rookeries.

Imagine my excitement during our first week of the trip when I was sure I’d spotted my first one. We were staying with friends in the beautiful Chilterns when I saw this tree in an old churchyard. Rooks’ nests, for sure!

Alas, no — mistletoe. Mind you, I was pretty excited to see this plant growing in the wild for the first time in my life having only experienced the plastic or needle-felted versions up until then.

It’s a pretty amazing plant, growing like giant disco balls amid the branches of the trees. Semi-parasitic, it acquires some food via photosynthesis while also relying on the host tree for nutrients. The sticky white berries are poisonous to humans but great food for birds.

The word “mistletoe” comes from the Old English words mistel, meaning “dung”, and tan, meaning “twig”. While not an especially romantic name (especially for something you might be kissing under) it does accurately sum up how mistletoe is spread to trees by birds leaving seed-filled droppings after snacking on the berries.

You’ll be happy to hear that I did eventually find rookeries. Several of them!

Here’s the first one I spotted near Portmeirion in North Wales.

The first clue that this was, in fact, a rookery, was the presence of rooks! Lots of adult rooks and very noisy baby rooks.

It’s so interesting to see corvids raising their young in a big cooperative nursery. I’m used to the very territorial behaviour of our local nesting crows and their strict “you stay in your half a block of territory and I’ll stay in mine or there will be big trouble” approach.

Below is a large rookery that friends took me to visit on Anglesey. I have the best friends!

We saw another big rookery on a day trip to Hexham in the North East of England. On this occasion, Phillip, my cousin and her husband patiently waited for me for at least half an hour while I watched the goings-on. I also have the best relatives!

The closest I got to rooks on the ground was on a day trip to St. Abbs in Scotland, where rooks and jackdaws were flying together.

I don’t know any legends about rooks, but I do have a good anecdote.

This was told to me by an Irish man I met on the street when we were both watching an owl in a downtown Vancouver tree. He told me that, back in Ireland, his aunt had a rookery near her cottage. She felt that the rooks were unlucky so she tried to smoke them out. Unfortunately, she ended up burning down her cottage in the process so I guess, in a way, she was right …

So, have a wonderful holiday season and remember, rook-wise:

no kissing them under the mistletoe (or anywhere else)
in general, just live and let live!

And finally, Festive Greetings from the June Hunter Images Board of Directors.

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© junehunterimages, 2024. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to junehunterimages with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Tech Stress and a Raven’s Nest

August 1, 2024August 1, 2024 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 7 Comments

My tech stress and the raven’s nest have nothing in common except that one is proving therapeutic in the face of the other.

I think you can guess which one is which.

The technical bit is boring, so I’ll just tell you that my file storage system is suddenly lifeless and incommunicado. Shades of the timeless Monty Python “dead parrot” sketch.

Fortunately (sort of) I’m a veteran of 35 years of “oh my god, how can all that priceless information have vanished in a heartbeat” moments, so I’m pretty neurotic about backing up most of my backups. Still, I’ll be much happier when I get the new hardware and see for sure that the backup drives are OK.

To talk myself down from the stress ceiling, I’ve been looking at some of my favourite moments from our spring trip to the UK, and I came across videos of this raven’s nest we were lucky enough to see in Scotland.

And there WAS a lot of luck involved.

First of all, we almost didn’t go to St. Abbs — a lovely village just over the Scottish border from our B&B in Berwick-upon-Tweed.

We had planned to spend our last morning on the northern Northumberland coast at Lindisfarne. We’d been waiting patiently for that rare convergence of tides and byzantine bus schedules that would allow us to get to Holy Island on public transit, and Saturday was the day.

At the last minute, based on the advice of bird watchers we met on buses and in cafés, we changed our minds and instead hopped on a bus to St. Abbs. It was, we were told, a great place for seeing birds.

The St Abbs area stood in for New Asgard in the filming of the “Avengers: Endgame” — so we knew the scenery would be fairly spectacular.

Thor’s Hammer in the St Abbs Visitors’ Centre

And it really was.

The bus let us off in the village and from there we headed out on the walk along the cliff-side walk to the lighthouse at St. Abbs Head. We already had one eye on our watches as there was only one bus back south to Berwick-upon-Tweed to catch our train back to Newcastle.

View of cliffs and homing pigeon at St Abbs (photo)

A homing pigeon heading back to his loft in St Abbs

June and Phillip on the cliffs at St Abbs

Walking the path with the village in the background

Rocky pinnacle at St Abbs, Scotland. Raven stands at top, guarding nest below

Spot the raven on the top of this rock outcropping. I didn’t even see it as we hurried past the first time on our destination, the lighthouse at St Abbs Head.

Galloping along, we reached the lighthouse and were rewarded by the sight of many sea birds nesting on the jagged cliffs.

We saw guillemots, eider ducks and kittiwakes. There may have been the odd puffin in. the crowd but, if so, we didn’t have time to pick them out.

Guillemots and Eider Ducks.

I was thrilled to get my first close up look at rooks too! I’d watched them tending to their young in rookeries in Wales and England, but always up high in the trees. There was another rookery at the start of the St Abbs path and, further along, the adult rooks were coming down to the fields above the crags to forage. Hooray!

There were lots of jackdaws too, making their pinball arcade game calls and wheeling about in the sky with the rooks.

I was already very happy with our trip to St Abbs Head as we headed back at a brisk bus-catching pace.

Hikers looking like Sound of Music extras at St Abbs, Scotland

Here my telephoto lens makes Phillip pointing at birds and someone taking a selfie look like a promo shot for a Sound of Music remake

It was as we were striding purposefully back past that rocky tower when Phillip spotted it — a raven’s nest!!!

Wide shot photo of cliffs with a raven's nest and raven parent guarding it on the cliffs at St Abbs, Scotland

You can see the adult raven on the very top and, looking straight down to a pale area on the crags below — there’s the nest!

I’m pretty sure he almost regretted pointing it out, as it was then like prying a limpet off a rock to get me to move again in the direction of the bus stop.

The nest was pretty far away from the path and it was very windy, so the photo and video quality isn’t great, but I did my best — in the face of a lot of pressure to get moving.

Photo of four raven babies in a nest on the cliffs at St Abbs, Scotland

Three babies still in the nest and one doing a bit of exploring below it

In the video below (sorry for the wind noise) you can see the one adventurous baby exploring among the sea pinks outside of the nest. One of the young ravens in the nest makes a tentative flapping motion. In this location there’s not a lot of room for error, so these raven fledglings (like other cliff-nest dwellers) , must be pretty sure of their flying skills when they make the momentous choice to take off.

By now, I was noticing a slight note of hysteria in Phillip’s warnings about the time, so it was time to stuff the camera back into the bag and set off at a jog towards the bus stop.

We caught the bus and were able to tuck this little raven’s nest memory away for a mentally rainy day. I like to close my eyes and think of all four of those young ravens now soaring over the cliffs at St Abbs.

While I’ve been writing the blog, the new computer hardware has arrived, so now I just have to wait for my tech person to come over and put it all back together for me. Fingers crossed!

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Always Something New …

August 19, 2023 / The Urban Nature Enthusiast / 2 Comments

After over ten years of watching crows every day you sometimes think perhaps you’ve seen it all, but no — they always have something else amazing up those feathery sleeves.

I’ve written before about the crow (and squirrel) festival we have at the end of our street when a combination of walnut, hazelnut and chestnut trees start producing their harvest. Hundreds of crows stop by on the way to the roost in the evening and have big noisy get-togethers while feasting on the bounty. This usually starts in September.

It’s only August, of course, but it’s been so hot and dry that the trees are dropping fruit early. Bongo and Bella are anxious to get in on the action on their home turf, so I’ve seen them a few times now dropping walnuts, still in the green husks, from the hydro wires onto the road to try and break them.

Anyway, there was either Bongo or Bella dropping a nut this morning when one of the fledglings came over to have a look at what mom or dad was pecking at.

Instead of begging for a taste, they crouched down and started making the rattle call.

The rattle call continued as they went on to adopt a fully prostrate pose in the middle of the road. I’m not sure if they were addressing this display to the parent crow or the walnut.

Bongo or Bella decided to leave the fledgling to their walnut-worship and sauntered off.

Left alone with the prize, the fledging took a few investigatory pecks and also wandered off.

Lessons no doubt learned. But what exactly that lesson was, I’d love to know.

More on Bongo and Bella and the kids tomorrow …

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© junehunterimages, 2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to junehunterimages with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.