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Rooks are highly gregarious birds and are generally seen in flocks of various sizes. Males and females pair-bond for life and pairs stay together within flocks. In the evening, the birds often congregate at their rookery before moving off to their chosen communal roosting site.
Communal roosting is an animal behavior where a group of individuals, typically of the same species, congregate in an area for a few hours based on an external signal and will return to the same site with the reappearance of the signal. [1] [2] Environmental signals are often responsible for this grouping, including nightfall, high tide, or ...
Group living provides the presence of social information within the group, allowing both male and female members to find and select potential mating partners. Alongside this, living in a group allows for higher reproductive success as individuals have access to a greater number of potential mates, and the possibility to choose between them. [ 1 ]
Many kinds of birds are known to congregate in groups of varying size; a congregation of nesting birds is called a breeding colony. Colonial nesting birds include seabirds such as auks and albatrosses ; wetland species such as herons ; and a few passerines such as weaverbirds , certain blackbirds , and some swallows .
Corvidae is a cosmopolitan family of oscine passerine birds that contains the crows, ravens, rooks, magpies, jackdaws, jays, treepies, choughs, and nutcrackers. [1] [2] [3] In colloquial English, they are known as the crow family or corvids.
Western jackdaws frequently congregate with hooded crows [35] or rooks, [37] the latter particularly when migrating or roosting. [57] They have been recorded foraging with the common starling (Sturnus vulgaris), Northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), and common gull (Larus canus) in northwestern England. [57]
A rookery is a colony breeding rooks, and more broadly a colony of several types of breeding animals, generally gregarious [1] birds. [2] Coming from the nesting habits of rooks, the term is used for corvids and the breeding grounds [3] of colony-forming seabirds, marine mammals (true seals or sea lions), and even some turtles.
Each group has one breeding female; she is protected by a large number of male defenders who are armed with enlarged snapping claws. As with other eusocial societies, there is a single shared living space for the colony members, and the non-breeding members act to defend it. [69]