Watching Birds – The Jackdaw

Continuing my series of mindful birdwatching this post is about the jackdaw – ‘the artful dodger’ of the bird world.

Our smallest crow, the jackdaw is a bird of woodland, parkland, coasts and urban areas – so you’re just as likely to see one in our city streets, cathedral precinct, or a McDonalds car park, as you are in ancient woodlands.

They are gregarious and highly social birds mating for life and uniquely use their (silver grey-white) eyes to communicate with each other – and  with us too; recognising our faces and responding to our expressions …

lunch break a jackdaw catches my eye 

Often seen in loose flocks, performing aerial acrobatics, they seem to revel in strong blustery winds. Here’s an insightful passage (edited to remove most of the anthropomorphisms) from Konrad Lorenz (1903 – 1989) the co-founder of modern ethology (the study of animal behaviour) from his book King Solomon’s Ring (1949) …

… I walk to the window to watch this extraordinary game that the jackdaws are playing with the wind. A game? Yes, indeed, it is a game, in the most literal sense of the word: practised movements, indulged in and enjoyed for their own sake. And rest assured, these are not merely inborn, purely instinctive actions, but movements that have been carefully learned – their wonderful exploitation of the wind, their amazingly exact assessment of distances and, above all, their understanding of local wind conditions, their knowledge of all the up-currents, air pockets and eddies—all this proficiency is no inherited trait …

… And look what they do with the wind! Soon you see, with astonishment, that nearly, but only nearly, do they give the storm its head, let it throw them high, high into the heavens, till they seem to fall upwards, then, with a casual flap of a wing, they turn themselves over, open their pinions for a fraction of a second from below against the wind, and dive—with an acceleration far greater than that of a falling stone—into the depths below. Another tiny jerk of the wing and they return to their normal position and, on close-reefed sails, shoot away with breathless speed into the teeth of the gale, hundreds of yards to the west: this all playfully and without effort, just to spite the wind that tries to drive them towards the east. …

Like other crows they gather at night in large roosts and form impressive displays – called a clattering, before settling; their loud ‘kya’ calls keeping them together. Nothing like as tight a formation as that of starlings (See Starling Murmuration) but it’s still very impressive. You can see (hear) why it’s called a clattering. Here’s quite a long unedited video of them in their pre-roosting display …

The evening ‘dance’ of jackdaws in a remote Welsh valley (uploaded to YouTube by Jan Mills). What an awesome display; it must have been deafening. Listen closely and you may also hear an alarm call of a blackbird, a crow and possibly a dog barking in the distance.

Thanks for reading!

Oh and next time you’re in McDonald’s keep an eye out for those artful jackdaws …

Authors Note

My fun, mindful single-line haiku (‘lunch break’) – a form of Japanese short-form poetry – rather fittingly I think, encapsulates their mischievous nature and ability to engage with us socially. If you liked it you can read more of my work in my online collection ‘hidden by clouds’ …

Citations

The beautiful watercolour of the jackdaw was painted by Jonathan Pomeroy, and kindly reproduced with his permission. Jonathan works as a freelance wildlife and landscape artist and enjoys observing wildlife and landscape on location, keeping extensive sketchbooks packed with ideas for compositions. He exhibits at many shows and prestigious galleries around the whole of the UK, with his work permanently on show at Birdscapes Gallery, Norfolk and Nunnington Galleries. Since the pandemic he has increased his online presence and today you can find more of his stunning work through his website and blog …

The audio clip of a jackdaw was made by Michel Veldt. Accessible at Xeno-Canto under the terms of the  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License