Bird of the Month: Jackdaw John Mcewen

Is there anything more joyful in nature than the clack of jackdaws, breaking across the sky with the sound of 15 struck snooker balls? ‘Jack’ is a precise imitation, as is ‘daw’, of their calls. But jackdaw ( Corvus monedula) derives from the Latin monedula, from the same stem as moneta/ money, from its perceived love of bright things.

Suitably, its eyes are brilliant as pearl buttons. Its thieving reputation was compounded by the most famous of the Rev Richard Harris Barham’s bestselling The Ingoldsby Legends, The Jackdaw of Rheims. In Barham’s burlesque poem, the cardinal lays aside his ring to wash his hands, and a jackdaw steals it. The cardinal curses everyone and everything; the jackdaw sickens from the curse and is duly exposed as the thief. He discloses the ring, the cardinal lifts the curse, and the jackdaw flourishes and is canonised.

Jackdaws like to nest in tree holes and rock crevices, notoriously in chimneys and legendarily in churches. William Cowper in The Jackdaw envies their indifference to the human comedy below:

Thrice happy bird! I too have seen Much of the vanities of men, And sick of having seen ’em, Would cheerfully these limbs resign For such a pair of wings as thine, And such a head between ’em.

They make good pets. A well-known 1933 photo shows a man smoking a pipe with a jackdaw perched on his shoulder as he addresses a putt at Ventnor golf course. Becky Parkin, in Country Life last June, remembered her Jacko, who thrived on scrambled egg, had his own desk at school, and once made off with an elderly lady visitor’s ‘very expensive dental plate’. In 2018, a Dr David A Harris related the fate of an ornithologist who fed his pet jackdaw (which flew behind from tree to tree) titbits from his pocket on their walks. When he relieved himself against a trunk, there was ‘what can only be described as a misunderstanding’.

Old beeches are a favourite nesting site, the rank nest disclosing blackfreckled, sky-blue eggs. Often they will pluck fur and hair from grazing animals for lining the nest, which in chimneys can be several feet deep. Our illustrator, Carry Akroyd, reckons they like a fire in the grate, the smoke ridding their feathers of parasites. A pastime by the sea is to hang in the updraft from a cliff. Customers of the café at Cornwall’s Lizard Point can sit while jackdaws float motionless and within touching distance as they hold their stations in the breeze.

Numbers dipped in the 1970s but by this year had recovered to 1.4 million breeding pairs. Their principal diet is insects, the remainder divided between vegetable and animal matter. A jackdaw winging its way with a struggling starling chick across the gardens at Mellerstain is a recent unpleasant memory.

Ian Morton, writing in Country Life last November, listed some jackdaw curiosities. When Adolf Hitler appropriated art in the 1930s, he was derided as ‘the jackdaw of Linz’. ‘Kafka’ means ‘jackdaw’ in Czech. And the bird is the emblem of Malmesbury, whose inhabitants are called ‘jackdaws’.