Introduction
Rooks. What are they when I say this word im sure the castle shaped chess piece comes to mind. But after you have read this I am sure you will be thinking of this pest of a bird when someone says the word Rook. My goal for this inquiry is to inform you about a pest in the Bay Of Plenty that I fell passionate about containing and getting rid of , so I chose this flying devil. This bird may seem harmless and maybe even cute, but as this report goes on I am sure I will change your mind. Now I will inform you on the attributes and habits of this bird.
What are Rooks
Rooks are a sleek bird with black with a purple tint in the wings. They are part of the corvine family, in this family you have the crow, raven, magpie and even jays with many more in the family. The Rook is larger than the crow and smaller than the raven, the rook comes in at about 45 cm for females and up to 50 cm for males. These birds are very intelligent, they have been known to be able to solve complicated puzzles and problems. But these smarts are also used for not so great things, they have been known to take the eyes out of live sheep and lambs that is revolting, they also have negative effects on our environment, which I will get in to later on in the report. The Rook is a very wide spread bird they can be foud from Western Europ to Japan, America to Russia as you can see these birds are a very common bird and that's why there a problem They are highly territorial and have been known to attack people from their rookery (their nest high up in the tree tops) and injure and scare them away. What i ave said so far is already scarry enough to but be of the idea of messing with Rooks. I will now get in to the breading patterns of the bird.
Breading patterns
The Rook breads from Auguste to November so that's four months of new pest being born and ruining the wildlife. The birds lay their eggs in nests called rookeries made with twigs, grass, moss, leaves and lined with animal hair, the nest are at minimum 10 meters from the ground and at the tallest 30 meters. The bird's eggs are around 39 mm tall and 28 mm wide, there can be 1 to 7 pale greenish blue with brown splotches, the mothers sit with the eggs from 17 to 18 days until they hatch, when hey hatch they nestle with their mothers for around 33 days, and they become fully independent around the 8th week, and bread in their 2nd to 3rd year of life these birds have been known very territorial and aggressive to wards people that have similar mannerisms to crows in that they attack people too little to no reason.
What impact do rooks have on their food web / environment
The bird is a hunter, their goal is to take easy prey and kill it, they like hunting kiwi and their eggs, they also hunt small ducklings, small lizards like skinks. The bird also destroys crops like maize, corn and farm land, the rook has been terrorising farmers round the world since the 1500 hundreds, ruining their food and making it hard for people to eat, but luckily they do have some predators such as hawks and eagles and even some owls. The rooks live in rural areas farmlands but surprisingly they don't live in dense forest but in small bush they like to nest in trees such as pine, macrocarpa and eucalyptus They need the wide open areas for them to fly and hunt with ease. Because of their size they choose wide open areas. Recently the birds have been fleeing into the city to become safer so no predators could attack them, it is also easy to find food for them on the floor.
What other countries are doing
So in this report as you might have gathered I am trying to figure out how to remove containing
The bird, so now I want to see what other countries are doing to contain them. In England, they are not as bad for wildlife, but they do affect harvest because they take the food and ruin the farmland. So now let's get in to what they're doing, in England they have made a kite called the hawk kite, the premise of the kite is to scare away birds including rooks, the kite fly around crops and farmland, but they can also be found in large city areas, so they will not attack passerby and keep them away from city areas. As mentioned in a previous paragraph they can be found in America and japan but there not a problem there because they have predators to contain the bird like fox eagles and many more while here we have hawks. Now I will be getting in to some ways of getting rid/contains the bird.
Different ways of removing or eradicating Rooks
The ways of getting rid of the bird can somewhat very on were there found, but there are two main ways of removing them, one way is to put a rope round your waist that is attached to a harness and scale the tree, then you go from near the base of the nest and use a device called a telescope pole, it is agustible and easy to use, it has a little T shape on the end that fits well in between the tree branches and knock the nest out of the tree, this can take any were from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to remove the nest once you get to the top. The problem with this method is that it takes a lot of physical labour, but it is very cost-efficient. We also have shooting and hunting but this also has its down sides like people need a gun license and be well practised with a fire arm and a good shot. The last method is to have some one scout out below the trees and radio back to the team, and they fly a helicopter with someone in a harness connected to a rope, they have to poison each nest individually, which also takes a lot of labour, the reason they use helicopters is for hard to get to trees that are too tall to climb. The don side of this is it is ridiculously expensive because they have to pay for fuel and a helicopter, that is why the bird is such a pain to remove. This means that we will need to make new methods of removing this bird or it will be too hard to contain if this happens, our crops will be ruined and our animals will be endangered. When we went on a bush walk an expert told us that there are many types of traps for possums that very in price and effective ness, but the rook dose not have these. Now I will conclude my report.
Conclution
In this report I have given you information about rooks such as what they are been there from what they do and effective ways of getting rid of them. I hoped you learned a lot about why the rook is a pest and how we are going to control and get rid of them, and if we don't start soon to really tackle this issue or it will be too late. So in conclusion I would like to say thank you for reading this report.