Rook: Covus frugilegus. Also a word meaning to cheat or to steal. Also a piece in chess.
Rooks are the most social of the corvidae. They build nests in rookeries (an obsolete name, incidently for a ghetto of thieves and whores), many hundred of birds to a tree.
They have enough of a language that even humans can tell the difference between their danger calls and their all-clear calls. They can imitate human speech.
But there's something else: The mystery.
It's a mystery from wheich we derive the collective noun we use for these birds. Like a murder of crows, a tiding of magpies, an unkindness of ravens...
A Parliament of Rooks.
You'll get a field. Empty. Suddenly the sky is black with birds. And they fall like a ragged black rain onto a field, covering it completely. Or almost completely.
In the center of the field, there's an empty space. And in the middle of that space sits one lone rook.
It caws and calls, and caws some more.
Ten thousand little eyes stare at it, unflinching. Sometimes they call out, as if they're asking questions. It's like a parliament. It's like a trial.
The lone rook continues to caw. And the others wait.
This can go on for hours. From dawn till near dusk.
Then, one of two things can happen...
On some signal--which the human observers have been unable to identify--either the birds take wing as one, leaving the lone rook alone in the field...
...or, again as one, they call on the bird, and peck it to death.
That's what happens.
But--
--It's not a parliament or a trial.
The rook in the middle of the field is a storyteller. It's telling the rest of them a story.
And when it finishes...it finds out whether or not they liked the story or not.