Birds of a feather and the human condition

I ran across this story online about rooks. (Americans may want to think of crows, because they are related.) It sounds sadly human ...

"A lady wrote to the correspondence columns of a newspaper to recount an interesting experience. The trees in her garden provided the nesting site for a large colony of rooks. One day she observed a pair of the birds starting to build their nest at some distance from the main colony, but this independence could not be tolerated by the rest of the colony (rooks are strongly social and gregarious) and they demolished this attempt at a break- away. The couple did not give up, but persisted in a second attempt; this suffered a like fate, as did their third attempt at diversity. The day after their third effort had failed, the lady was awoken by unusual sounds from the birds. She got up and went to the window, from where she saw the rooks ranged in a circle on the grass, and in the centre of the circle was an isolated pair. After a period of agitated excitement the mob attacked the errant pair and killed them."