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.
The term rookery was also borrowed as a name for dense slum housing in nineteenth-century cities, especially in London.
See also
- Auca Mahuevo, for a titanosaurid sauropod dinosaur rookery
- Bird colony
- Heronry
- Rook shooting