The surprising thing is that anyone should be surprised. It happens every year in the first five or six months. We enjoy balmy days when, according to the calendar, we should be enduring cold and frost and hail or snow. Then, when the inevitable comes, we look at the former greenery outside as if deceived, cheated. Buddleia leaves hanging down like strips of boiled cabbage; a fuchsia, standing right up beside the front door, back to the wind, a mass of black leaves; brilliant Forest Flame (pieris forrestii) gone from red to burnt orange; even a thriving Dawn Redwood, just leafing, is blasted. The landscaper friend says it is not the frost itself that does the damage, it's the action of the sun on the frosted leaves which breaks down the cells of the leaf or blossom. We'll take his word for it.
Same friend went from Meath to Wicklow in Sunday, to Laragh and environs, and saw no similar destruction. So. One good thing, remarks the bird-lover, is that the leafing of some trees in which rooks nest will be held back, and he will be able to watch their colonies for a few weeks more. This is his only indulgence in birdwatching, apart from the garden feeder system. He admires the posture of the sentinels up there, among the top branches. Just one bird, it seems, immobile for the most part, watching over a nest or a small group of nests. The picture of dignity.
It's dangerous, if you are driving, so hand over the wheel. Great viewing on the main road from Dublin to Dunshaughlin, Navan, Kells. It's particularly interesting after you pass the side road to Fairyhouse on the outward journey, for here the birds have been making great experiments with the corvine equivalent of town houses, as these groups of newish, desirable estates of smallish smart brick houses are called. Some of the nests now built in smaller trees, often ash, are dangerously near the ground, you would think. They may be outcasts, for rook law is said to be strict. And Gilbert White, author of the Natural History of Selborne, dated around 1788, claims that rooks are always fighting and pulling each other's nests to pieces - "and yet if a pair offer to build in a single tree, the nest is plundered and demolished at once." David Cabot in his Irish Birds has it that rooks "are extremely sociable and highly gregarious". The bird is not treated at all respectfully in the English language. The dictionary gives rook as a transitive verb: "to cheat, to defraud by cheating, esp. in gaming; to charge extortionately; chiefly in slang or colloq." Y