Anyone lived near a rookery? 🪹 🐦‍⬛ 🌳

[Inyournewdress]

I wonder if anyone here has lived or lives near a rookery and how disturbing or irritating the sound is, or the bird poo?!

We like a couple of properties on a street that has a large rookery basically next door to it. At first I thought how charming, then I wondered about what it would be like as a constant or waking me up at 4 am..I can’t really put earplugs in as have a young child.

Not charming. They are very clever birds who will yell at you when you when you use your own garden. They will use your car for target practice. Im not joking ours aim their shits at our car door handles.

A ‘rookery’ in Victorian London meant a slum where thieves, whores and bully boys lived’ , I thought ‘Well, no’ . Birds ….🤷🏼

There is another house or two and a road between one of the properties and the trees with the rooks, I think…looking at a map and trying to remember.

I live near a few. They are an amazing sight mornings and evenings when they fly round as a group chatting. It won't wake me though, unless your windows are terrible!
I've never had an issue with poo, but I have had to buy a specific bird feeder to make sure the little birds get some food too.

I do. They can be noisy when we're outside in the garden, but tbh I've tuned them out now.

They do crap on the car a lot - although there's a tree over the driveway, so it's inevitable I think.

The ones here don't do anything problematic like harass dogs or dive bomb people or anything. They just flap about and croak a lot, especially when they're fledging. Sometimes they decide to go searching through the moss on the roof which can be a bit noisy but they don't do it often.

Eta: I've never been woken by them, and they don't make noise at night.

We live next to one in a patch of woodland bout 100m away (although it is a thriving rookery and they are spreading closer).
Can't hear them through double glazing at all and after being here a few years don't really notice the noise when outside.
They probably keep the rat population down by cleaning up any leftover chicken food, my only complaint is they live above what would be lovely patch of wild garlic to forage if it wasn't for their poo

We occasionally get a rook banging on a bedroom window with its beak early in the morning. Different windows. Does it for a few weeks at a time, then stops - until the next time.

We have lots of jackdaws in the trees in our garden and next door, which I guess is similar. They are noisy, and yes, our cars get pooed on a lot, but I just see it as part of rural life and most of the time don't really notice it. Next door's cockerel wakes me up more often than the jackdaws and we currently have an owl that I swear sits outside my bedroom window just waiting for me to fall asleep and then starts tooting at 10 minute intervals all night .

Thanks for the replies, it helps me get an idea. Sounds like potential minor nuisance then but maybe not a huge issue especially since there is a house and a lane between?

We had this problem with a sea gull. We printed out a picture of an eagle and stuck it facing out in the window - problem solved!!

Yep, I live next to one… they crack me up. They land on the roof at stupid o clock in the morning during the Summer and it sounds like a troupe of Irish dancers. They squawk all day and when they come home to roost in the evening it’s like a scene from a Hitchcock movie. Car is always covered in shit. They eat all the food I leave out for the small birds.

All that being said though, I have gotten used to it 😅

We have lots of rooks in the woods next to our house. They are highly entertaining and I love watching them building their nests and then protecting them. A red kite tried to muscle in a few weeks ago and it was like a flash kid in a souped-up car trying to move into an established estate with more staid families. The neighbourhood watch saw him off and went back to looking after their nests.

I like their squawking and don't really notice it after nearly 30 years.

They're highly entertaining. I am hugely noise sensitive but natural noises don't bother me one whit.

Drum and bass, or that high pitched screeching young girls do, on the other hand ....

Embrace the rooks but if you are this worried about noise, ( with which I sympathise) pray you don't end up with noisy human neighbours and their feral children. Because it happens in naice areas too.

Does anybody remember that thread about the lady dogwalker the crows didn’t like? She never returned to the thread, did she?

Tbf that sounds quite stressful 😬

I know what you mean, I have had noisy neighbours several times and it is more aggravating when you know that they know that they are massively disturbing everyone else and don’t care. I mean what’s the point in telling your neighbour that the professional level speaker system blasting out music under your window and the hundred drunk people shouting are disturbing at 3am….they can’t have missed that, they just clearly don’t care 😖

I have between about 20 and 40 birds in my garden, ten foot from my window at any point in time right now. Ranging in size from double the size of my thumb to ravens. The little chirpers are currently starting at 5.45am, it's nice knowing the sun's up because the little ones are up and about. They don't really make very much noise at all until I take food out around 9am (rats - don't leave feeders out).

Tbh the sodding pigeons are far more troublesome than all the corvids put together. Stupid fighting idiots always flap-squeak-flapping-OMG-how-do-I-bird-birds with their horrible EEP EEP-wing noise and always chasing one another off for no reason at all just because they don't like the look of one another. Their stupid flapping noises are the worst when you're trying to sleep.

The corvids are pretty well behaved and entertaining. There are a few pairs who eat from one feeder together. The raven thump thump thump eats and whacks the tray like a woodpecker.

So nah, I don't think corvids are the problem.

The farmer whose bird scarer (which sounds like gunshots) that started to go off at 6.01am this morning though - urgh.

We do get a lot of poop. But I have a hot water garden hose and that helps a lot.

Pigeons and humans. The rest are all good fun and entertaining and/or sweet.

@Muchtoomuchtodosomeone did recommend I get a realistic-looking model owl to deter the window pecker, but by the time I got round to researching where on earth to get one of those from, it stopped.

There's a rookery about half a mile from my house (I live on the top of a hill and it's in the valley on one side). Late at night (and I'm talking half past eleven) when I take the dog out for her last walk, I can hear them chinking and kakking away to one another - they almost never seem to go quiet during nesting season. There are jackdaws nesting at the bottom of my garden but apart from sitting on the shed roof and yelling at me if the fat balls are late, they are no trouble. But a whole mass of them together can get VERY loud.