This week, up the mountain in Caerphilly, I have been taking great delight in watching (and hearing) a huge crowd of jackdaws swooping and diving every evening before they dive into a nearby tree and settle down for the night.
Starling murmurations are spectacular – when I was at university in Aberystwyth we used to sit in the bar on the pier and watch the thousands of birds coming in for the night, doing their aerobatics over the sea and then suddenly dropping out of the sky and vanishing.
These jackdaw flights look for all the world like a starling murmuration but Google tells me that this is actually known as a ‘clattering’. It also tells me that jackdaws are democratic in their roosting habits: some will start to squawk when they’re ready to get up in the morning and then when the noise reaches a majority pitch they all fly the roost. I guess it’s the same in the evenings, as from about 5pm they’ll start flying back and lining the ridges of the neighbours’ roofs, and when enough of them fly in the clattering begins. It really is a clattering – the noise is immense. Occasionally they’ll have a practice clatter in the afternoon and then all fly off again to do what jackdaws do – chiefly terrorising seagulls and demolishing the cherry tree next door, I think.
There are some examples on YouTube of these clatterings – I keep trying to capture it but my phone doesn’t do it justice.
I’ve written before about my fondness for the magpie family that lives in my Essex garden, which produces a noisy brood every year who run their poor mother literally ragged chasing her about after they’ve fledged. I like corvids in general (before anyone points it out – I know starlings aren’t in this family!. One year we had a little gang of them visiting the garden every day, comprising Richmond the Rook in his fluffy trousers, a pair of jackdaws and a few of the magpies. They were great fun, mastering the bird feeders together and working out how to get at the peanuts through teamwork.
I saw a raven eating a sausage roll from a Greggs bag in Clerkenwell once – huge thing, and I didn’t like to think about what had happened to the original purchaser of the sausagey treat. If the raven had come asking for my pastry snack I’d have handed it over, no questions asked.
Rooks are noisy and chatty and playful, and I always feel a bit sorry for the ones banished from the rookeries . What have they done that they have to go and find their own tree? There’s a large rookery near the church in North Weald, and it’s so loud when you walk past that it drowns out whatever I’m listening to.
Crows, on the other hand, stomp about the place looking slightly menacing, and at harvest time for all the world like they’ve been planted in flocks in the fields.
This week I’ll be back up in London, looking forward to getting back to work and getting ready for the family festival on Saturday. I’m not looking forward to my inbox though…
Also – happy Father’s Day to my excellent and well balanced dad, without whose sage advice my sisters wouldn’t be the functional, sane adults that we are today. Well done Dad…
Same time next week…
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous/Appassionata/Score!/Pandora – Jilly Cooper
What Kirsty did next 