Construction site

I  do love the sound of a rookery in the spring, with the clumsy, argumentative birds jostling and squabbling in those airy cages of bare branches. These ash trees around a country church yard host the birds for their breeding season each year, albeit not unanimously popular with the raucous calls and splashy droppings.

The negative connotations of the word rookery had me thinking about the way words for animal habitations  have been used when referring to people, almost always in disparaging ways: den of thieves, lair of bandits, nest of villains, warren of streets. Are there any others? The only exception I can think of is  hive of industry but then bees have always had a good public image. 

Rookery as a metaphor has fallen into disuse along with the extreme poverty it referred to (at least in the western world). Charles Dickens, in one of his efforts to raise public consciousness about the slums in Victorian London wrote thus about a Bermondsey 'rookery' on the banks of the Thames:

"...crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud and threatening to fall into it—as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Jacob's Island. "
 Oliver Twist 1838

To me it seems odd to use the nesting habits of a country corvid as an analogy for the urban squalor created by Victorian capitalism and sanctimony and I'm relieved that the word rookery is now confined to Corvus fructilegus -  a handsome bird seen closer in the extra. (Whoops, I am now told those are jackdaws!)