When I was young and much more omnivorous than I am now, I used to look forward with lip-licking relish to trips to my uncle’s farm in Cumberland around this time of year.
For on the outskirts of the farm was a copse of tall trees known as Crow Wood, which housed a thickly populated rookery, with scores of untidy nests.
The sound was deafening, the smell reminiscent of the elephant house at Belle Vue Zoo and the ground beneath the trees thick with guano.
In early spring, when the young birds had shrugged off their shells and grown feathers, but had not quite mastered the art of flying, the youngsters – known as branchers – used to sit obligingly on the edge of their nests, peering down at the gathering of humans many feet down below.
Among those on the ground were my uncle, my dad and several neighbours, who would spend a happy morning shooting the young rooks, to the shameless delight of my brother and me, who took great pleasure in gathering up the fallen nestlings.
But this wasn’t killing for killing’s sake – the dead birds were taken back to the farmhouse, and carefully butchered in the cart shed to make crow pie.
It should have been disgusting, but was actually very tasty indeed, as my aunt was a dab hand at cooking all manner of things you don’t see on many menus these days.
I was assured her talents included making moorhen egg omelettes and curlew stew, along with wood pigeon pie.
Only the tender breast was used in crow pie, baked under a pie crust with stewing steak, onions and perhaps a little bacon, and I found it preferable to the odd grouse that came to the table.
The dish, once popular in many rural areas, was of course the source of the Sing a Song of Sixpence nursery rhyme, where the four and twenty black birds – not blackbirds – were baked in a pie.
Crow pie is off the menu these days of course, as rooks are now a protected species, which is just as well for the black bandits of Bellingham.
I have perhaps mentioned before that I class myself as a bird lover, and spend an absolute fortune each year providing comestibles and bathing facilities for many avian visitors to the gardens of Hextol Towers.
However, I do have a strong aversion to all members of the corvid clan.
Ravens, carrion crows, hooded crows, jackdaws, and jays can all fly on by – and take those pesky magpies with them.
I suppose my dislike of crows goes back to the farm, where at lambing time a grotesque gang in undertaker black would always be hanging round the pens, hoping to spear an ovine eyeball or scrabble off with some awful offal.
Or perhaps it was the pet jackdaw my dad brought home one day, which used to swoop and sit on your head when you were on the loo, and spread itself sinisterly in front of the fire, beak agape.
My crowphobia has intensified in recent weeks, thanks to their outrageous misbehaviour around the fat ball feeding station.
A couple of weeks ago, I purchased a box of 150 choice fat balls from B&M in Hexham for a modest sum, and have been slotting them into a feeder, which hangs from a bracket intended for a hanging basket, which has been affixed to our rowan tree for 20 years or more.
All manner of birds including blue tits, great tits, coal tits and long-tailed tits and many other species tuck in to their hearts’ delight – until the heavy mob arrive.
The jackdaws come first mob-handed, all menace and malevolence, frightening away the smaller birds, and then a harsh croak from the clothes post indicates the arrival of the first bald-faced rook.
They slink sullenly away when they see they are being observed but they are fiendishly early risers, and three times in three days, they succeeded in dislodging the fat ball feeder from the hook, and casting it to the ground to allow easier access to the succulent contents.
After the third act of vandalism, I decided to set up additional security measures by using gardening wire to attach the feeder to the hook in impregnable fashion.
The next morning, I was delighted to see that the feeder was still robustly attached to the hook – the only problem was that the birds had somehow managed to rip the entire bracket off the tree!
And when I went out to visit the scene of the crime, I am sure I heard a smug corvine chortle coming from a distant treetop.
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