Peculiar beasts, jackdaws. Their black shine and serious eye betrays a light heart. They swoop, their wings beatless, and dive through brick canyons in jump jet attack formation, yet will play breezy on the wing when gusts and gales take slates from rotten roofs.
The jackdaws of Lynton, the north Devon town that hugs the cliffs overlooking the Bristol Channel, are exciting masters of flight. Mobbing in tight synchronicity, their time aloft is interspersed with prattling landings by chimneys heavy with woodsmoke. "Jack! Jack!" they remark with a deliberate persistance. "Jack! Jack!" they call to each other across the cold, wet winter town. Their hard, squeaky voices have been compared unfavourably with idle chattering; an ancient Greek proverb announces that, "The swans will sing when the jackdaws are silent", meaning that refined and educated people will wait their turn as common folk talk on until quiet ensues.
For much of the year inky coated jackdaws will happily sit with larger crows and rooks – and by the Exmoor coast sometimes even the red legged, red-beaked choughs. Their gregarious nature includes common shared feeding, a form of mutualism, although they take to a rigid social hierarchy by nature. A rather special feature of their predation is that their delight in stolen goods. Common magpies may enjoy the reputation for theft, but jackdaws also take shiny objects and even jewellery to nest.
Although quite keen on garbage, with a sideline in bugs and the odd worm, their main feasts appear to be vegetarian in nature. Whole flocks can descend upon a field of wheat and do great damage. It is precisely because of this that Tudor laws were enacted to keep their numbers down, and they are still some of the few species that can be set in traps.
Shy, unless decidedly urban, jackdaws can mob fierce predators, and take their food from other birds in flight. Fond of a tick or two, they will hitch a ride on bovine or ovines to seek out a choice bloody morcel. They will, themselves, be taken by larger raptors such as falcons.
Sociable birds by inclination, they are thought here in the Czech Republic to be harbingers of conflict should they be heard quarrelling. So, they sit quite happily around the cathedral spires of Olomouc, merry enough to waste time on the wing, contented in their lot for now. With an eye on the situation in Ukraine, may their continued presence be peaceful, as much as they keep it for us.
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