Indiscriminate Slaughter?

Britons who consider it unseemly to show emotion over human affairs can steam up quickly over fauna and flora. Especially birds. A wartime British movie, The Tawny Pipit (TIME, Oct. 6), pretty well proved that one rural village had almost forgotten the Battle of Britain for a fortnight in its excitement over the nesting drama of two rare specimens of Anthus campestris.

Last week bird lovers were again having a time. In the letters column of the Manchester Guardian, several correspondents described the belligerent tendency of male British bullfinches and chaffinches to attack their own reflections in windowpanes, incidentally disturbing the early morning slumber of human Britons. Nobody suggested shooting the noisemakers; the correspondents seemed to favor a mild deterrent--white paper stretched over the window to abolish reflection.

The 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?"

The 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."

* "Six youg rooks, one-half pound of steak, one ounce dripping, one half pint stock, one ounce flour, pepper and salt."

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