Call Bird: the Crow, the Human Being

My guide to Kentish dialect says that scrumping kids appointed a look out called a call bird, after the habit of jays and other crows of having one bird on guard when feeding on a crop.

It brought back to me wryly the confusion at the inquest- if the shot gun was to scare miners or rooks?

In this story of migrants, subject to prejudicial judgments, fuelled by economic necessity- birds are a metaphor of sorts-

From the condemnation of magpies on circumstantial evidence damning them for songbird declineto to the destruction of skylarks nests as the economic rewards for industrial methods by farmers intensifies(In Kent in the twenties farmworkers marked the position of the nests.)

Miners, small farmers and many bird species have this in common, they have passed through the mill of the twentieth century with their numbers in steep decline.