I live in a Rookery

There aren’t trees on Orkney. At least not outside of town. But in Kirkwall, there are trees dotted about the town and I live near two little groves. The noise coming from them can be deafening – at first I would have said dozens of crows, but the more I watch, the more I realize they number in the hundreds, and roost in the two aforementioned groves. And caw. I can hear them from my house. Late afternoon the crows start their commute home to the trees (I don’t know where they go during the day, but they return en masse) and the sky is black with them.

They don’t affect our morning walk, but in the evening they can be quite scary with all the swooping and cawing (and I worry too about the pooping, but haven’t seen too much of that) and anyone who knows crows knows they are clever, and can take dislikes to people. It hadn’t occurred to me that moving to Orkney and trying to fit in would include staying on the good side of a murder of crows.