The cawing of the rooks in February shows that the time is coming when their nests will be reoccupied. They resort to the tree, and perch above the old nests to indicate theirs; for in the rookery possession is the law, and not nine tenths of is only. In the slow dull cold of winter even these noisy birds are quite, and as the vast flocks pass over, ight and morning, to and from the woods in which they roost, there is scarcely a sound. Through the mist their black wings advance in silence, the jackdaws with them are chilled into unwanted quiet, and unless you chance to look up the crowd go over unnoticed. But as soon as the waters begin to make a sound in February, running in the ditches and splashing over stones, the rooks begin the conversations that will continue till late in the following autumn. The general idea is that they pair in February, but there are some reasons for thinking that the rooks, infact, choose their mates at the end of the preceding summer. They are then in large flocks. They move on the ground and fly in the air so close one beside the other, that at first glance or so you cannot distinguish them apart. Yet if you should be lingering along the by-ways of the fields as the acorns fall, and the leaves come rustling down in the warm sunny autumn afternoons, and keep an observant eye upon the rooks in the trees, or on the fresh-turned furrows, they will be seen to act in couples. On the ground couples alight near each other, on the trees they perch near each other, and in the air fly side by side. If you alarm them while feeding on the ground in winter, supposing that you have not got a gun, they merely rise up to the nearest tree, and it may then be observed that they do this in pairs. One perches in a branch and a second comes to him. When February arrives, and they resort to the nest to look after or seize on the property there, they are in fact already paired, though the almanacs put down St. Valentine’s day as the date of courtship.