Chessmen that start in the corners

Usage examples of rooks.

The very rooks are black, and the starlings and the wintry fieldfares and redwings have no colour at a distance.

Such rhymes might well be chanted about the hay and the wheat, or at the coming of the green leaf, or the yellowing of the acorns, when the cawing of the rooks is incessant, a kind of autumn festival.

This would seem to indicate a remarkable absence of the food they like, for it is very rare indeed for a piece of ground to be fresh ploughed without rooks coming to it.

Another place, again, in the same county is full of rooks, and the arum is green on the banks.

Sea-gulls have curiously rook-like habits in some respects, following the plough like them, and in spring wheeling for hours round and round in the sky as the rooks do.

All over the field there were no other swallows, nor in the adjacent fields, only in that one spot where the rooks were feeding.

In the grass they are the prey of rooks, crows, magpies, jackdaws, snakes, rats, and cats.

Two cuckoos called in different directions, wood-pigeons raised their voices in Selworthy Wood, and rooks went over cawing in their deliberate way.

As he reclined in the corner of the broad window-seat, his feet up, and drowsy, of a summer afternoon, he heard the languid cawing of an occasional rook, for rooks are idle in the heated hours of the day.

Also he shot rooks, once now and then strange wild fowl with this monstrous iron pipe, and something happened with this gun one evening which was witnessed, and after that the old fellow was very benevolent, and the punt was free to one or two who knew all about it.

The tall spinney of horse-chestnut trees, raucous with the calling of the rooks and rubbish-roofed with the clutter of their sprawling nests, was one of their familiar places.

Up against the lowering grey clouds, two black rooks were flapping slowly over the farm in a wide circle.

In a flash of memory he saw again the lowering sky over the spinney, dark with rooks, the big black birds wheeling and circling overhead.

Then something drew his gaze up through the arching trees to the sky, and he saw two black rooks flapping lazily past, high up.

And the rooks were quiet, only one or two of them drifting slowly to and fro sometimes over their wood.