ON THE WILD SIDE The jack of hearts
ACCORDING to folklore, the jackdaw is a vain and charismatic grey-haired thief who will steal your jewellery and fill his nest with treasures.
Reality is always a little less romantic, but there is some truth to it. Like its near relative the magpie, the jackdaw has long been known as a pilferer of shiny objects.
However, although pet jackdaws can be trained to steal (when I was a child a tame jackdaw in my local park had learned to untie laces) wild ones aren’t all that interested in human trinkets. The jackdaw is Britain’s smallest member of the crow family and should be a familiar sight to most of us. There are around three million of them living here and they can be found everywhere, including in cities. You may have seen them nesting in chimneys or old buildings where groups make haphazard, lumpy nests in any undisturbed space. There are reports of jackdaws filling entire rooms of abandoned houses with twigs to nest in.
Like their other corvid (crow) cousins, they are incredibly intelligent and can easily figure out how to steal food, pick scraps from covered bins or dismantle your bird feeders should they need to. They also have the ability to recognise individual faces, so they will remember if you have been kind to them. Socially, jackdaws are an interesting creature. They live in groups (sometimes called clatterings) which at this time of year join together for safety and warmth to make even bigger flocks (trains). These flocks have a strong social order, with the males establishing a rank and females “marrying” into it. Jackdaws can take a year to get to know a potential mate before they start raising chicks. They will then stay together for their whole lives, even if they can’t have chicks. Some studies indicate that as many as one in 10 jackdaw couples are same-sex. They have also been known to care for sick or injured relatives.
The chicks start out all-black and get their wonderful silver shade as adults. They get more grey as they age, and a grey-headed male holds a high rank in the flock. No dye for them!