Rootwing
I first properly noticed a rootwing on the wheelie bin outside a boarded chippy on the Middlewood Road end of S6, and my first thought was that something had gone badly wrong with it. Half its chest was bare skin, pink and cold-looking. What feathers it had left sat in tufts, like a jumper that's been at the moths for a season, and there's a faint sheen to the bald patches that isn't quite scar tissue and isn't quite anything else I've got a proper word for. It didn't stop pecking at the bin lid to acknowledge I'd noticed. It never has, not once, in any encounter since. That's the whole of the rootwing in one line, if you want it: a pigeon that gave up on looking like a pigeon in favour of never once looking up from a meal.
It eats constantly and it eats anything that could pass for scran. Chip papers, the grease left in chip papers, spilled lager, cigarette ends, other birds' eggs, plaster dust off a crumbling wall, a dropped glove once, as far as I could work out from what was left of the leather. It doesn't forage the way a normal pigeon forages - pause, peck, look about for a hawk that isn't coming. A rootwing moves between food sources at a fast, low, humpbacked shuffle-hop, the gait of somebody trying to beat the chippy shutters down at ten to eleven, head already low before it's arrived. Whatever it's doing with all that food, it isn't going into feathers. I've never seen a fat rootwing. I've never seen one with a full coat either, and I don't think those two facts are unrelated.
The actual danger in a rootwing is small: it will not yield food to you, ever, on any terms, and it does not recognise "back off" as a concept that applies to something its own size. Reach for a chip it's already committed to and you'll get pecked properly, hard enough to break skin, and it will keep eating while it does it. That's the whole of the direct risk, and it's not much. What matters more is what a roofline of them tells you. A dozen rootwings working one skip means that skip is feeding something bigger than rootwings, because they don't gather in numbers for scraps they could get anywhere - they gather where the scran keeps arriving faster than they can clear it, which round Hellsborough usually means somebody, or something, is leaving a lot of half-eaten meals behind on a regular schedule. Follow that logic and you rarely like where it ends.
They roost communally on the sort of buildings this city has given up maintaining: gutters gone soft with rot, the lee side of a dead chimney stack, anywhere with a ledge and a downpipe to keep the wind off. Corvids give a rootwing roost a wide berth, which is saying something, since corvids aren't fussy either. Ask around and you'll be told it's the noise, or the mess, or that a rootwing will go for a corvid's eggs same as anything else's. The moldenke who work the Wisewood edge have been known to use a rootwing roost as a landmark, on the grounds that if the birds are still coming back to it murkneet after murkneet, nobody's cleared that stretch out from underneath them lately.
Field note: don't leave scran out on a windowsill or a step in rootwing country, not even for a minute while you nip back for something. It isn't loyal to timing the way a fox is. It's already there before you've turned round.
| Type | Hungry |
| HP | 2 |
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