Mar 02, 2011: View/download wallpaper size (1920х1440, 0,67 M). Today my photo-prognostic part of brain declared that I need to take the camera to the morning jogging. (Since I`ve got a device above average snapshot-camera dimensions, I usually jog without it, but today I had a strong feeling that I _have_ to submit the inevitable.) So, while trotting slowly along warming lanes, among total snow all around, all of a sudden, I saw a rook. He sat just above the lane, ruffling his feathers, unfurling his tail and singing his simple spring song. The rook solemnly croaked the start of the spring, let me take about a dozen shots and flew away. And I thought: “Looks like I`m getting doomed to jog only with the camera.”

There is one disturbing concern: now we have rooks, but we still have no ground free from snow yet. That can cause problem with rooks` feeding. Well, let`s hope that rooks are rather big, and city garbage cans are plentiful, so our spring heralds will find something to eat until the snow starts melting. My thoughts were confirmed by other sources: Rooks come in the second half of march… They spend winter in the southern part of Russia, some individual rooks stay in towns of Central Russia together with crows and jackdaws. Such non-migrating birds are sometimes seen by journalists and then, starting from mid-February, our newspapers repeat one after another a news of “unusually early return of rooks”…

species Rook Corvus frugilegus