rookery

thumb|The Rooks Have Returned|The Rooks Have Come Back Again, [[Alexei Savrasov, 1871, canvas, oil, The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow]] thumb|Colonies of Indian yellow-nosed albatross|Indian yellow-nosed albatrosses on [[Amsterdam Island]] thumb|Fur seals in a rookery in the [[Pribilof Islands in the 1950s.]] A rookery is a colony of breeding rooks, and more broadly a colony of several types of breeding animals, generally gregarious birds.

Coming from the nesting habits of rooks, the term is used for corvids and the breeding grounds of colony-forming seabirds, marine mammals (true seals or sea lions), and even some turtles. Rooks (northern-European and central-Asian members of the crow family) have multiple nests in prominent colonies at the tops of trees. Paleontological evidence points to the existence of rookery-like colonies in the pterosaur Pterodaustro.