Evictees
 
Arriving like unforecasted weather,
their caws have rasped from roof tops
on the outskirts of my notice,
for the past few weeks now.
Initially the rooks spent their days
in this housing estate pretending
they were not at a loss.
Strutted roof ridges easy as brick boughs,
but failed to save face on sloping tiles.
Inevitably garden bird etiquette is no match
for their ransacking rural manners.
Even scrappy starlings are walked off roofs,
Whilst songsters lose their voices
beneath the mummer’s chorus.
And flying in clamorous formation,
tips of their wings tooled up with knife-like feathers,
they routinely make territorial sweeps.
A crisis will occur in Spring,
as they commandeer
lamppost and chimney tops,
the only surfaces flush enough
to support their nests, scruffy as piles of kindling.
Raucous chicks will squawk at all hours.
Parents in single minded pursuit of food
will shred lawns, thieve blossom and buds.
And their beaks, always stropped,
will take out black birds, thrushes, robins
who will make a plucky defence of their own
nests that will later be pillaged as spoils.
Assumption is these birds have had
their own ancestral rookery
stolen from under them by developers.
Initially, they must have scouted for woodland,
coppice, single standing tree even,
where tribal as gypsies,
they could rebuild their colony.
But discovering a rural rub out,
over the last month they have sized up our
housing estate and find it will answer,
so set about establishing their own new builds.

Fiona Sinclair

If you have any thoughts about this poem, Fiona Sinclair   would like to hear them.