Tag: rooks

327: for the birds

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

115: lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Ok, I might be exaggerating a bit here, but one of the wonders of living out here in sunny Essex is the variety of wildlife we get in the garden. The majority of it is welcome but some – like the odd rat – is less so. Living near farmland and with a watercourse near the house it’s inevitable, of course, but I still don’t want them snacking on the bird seed.

My favourites at this time of year are the blue tits who colonise the nest box and produce a brood of noisy chicks demanding feeding. The first sight of the babies as they peek out of the hole and glare at us is always an ‘aaahhh!’ moment, and one of the very bedraggled and exhausted parents paid us a visit one evening this week too. Rather foolishly, it had stopped for a rest on the fence outside the back door which surrounds the cats’ outdoor space – Lulu thought it was her birthday but Thing 2 came to the rescue. The bird was remarkably tame (or possibly just knackered) as we were able to get very close. It flew from Thing 2’s hand to my head before we were able to put it safely out of reach of the cat.

Bedraggled blue tit

The local shrew population has less luck when it comes to Lulu. The occasional one ventures in to the cat space (probably after the strawberries) and doesn’t live to tell the tale, instead becoming a love gift for my (and her) beloved. She’s always most annoyed when we take them away from her. She did bring a mouse in just before Christmas which we didn’t realise until it peeked out from behind my sewing machines, leading to a frenzied twenty minutes with a wooden spoon, an empty cheese sauce pot and finally a rehoming in the compost bin.

Today I have been joined in the garden by a baby sparrow, and every year we have robins, blackbirds, dunnocks, goldcrests, woodpigeons and collared doves. There’s a raucous family of magpies too, whose antics make me laugh. They are scrappy and behave like human siblings, arguing amongst themselves and rough and tumbling in the garden. The poor mother (I assume!) takes refuge on our neighbour’s roof, and as soon as the juveniles spot her they all go and join her. On one occasion there was a panicked squawking as one landed on the telephone wire and ended up upside down without enough sense to let go….

Other garden birds are woodpeckers, the odd sparrow hawk, starlings (nesting in next door’s roof), red kites soaring overhead, moorhens in wet springs and for the first time this year parakeets have flashed past. For several years we had a very tame pheasant who our builders named Colin after one of their colleagues who also strutted about. This year Richmond the Rook is a regular, stalking about in his fluffy rook trousers and hanging about with a couple of jackdaws.

The less feathered friends turn up too: we’re privileged to have badgers visiting from the Common as well as foxes, rabbits and the occasional muntjac. We can usually track their progress by the nibbled plants, much to my Beloved’s disgust. A slow worm can often be found in the greenhouse enjoying the warmth, while toads lurk under stones and tarpaulins and newts haunt the flowerpots. Most years we have a bumble bee nest somewhere, as well as squirrels and tiny mice.

One of my friends described coming through the back gate once as like walking into Narnia – sometimes I think she’s not far wrong!

Other things this week have included cheering on the RideLondon cyclists as they zoomed through the village, binging Stranger Things seasons 1-3 in preparation for season 4, seeing this year’s museum fox cubs playing in the sunshine, Thing 3 going off on his first solo sleepover at London Aunty’s house (it’s fancy, apparently), much crocheting of a shawl which is taking forever, a glorious swim, a mooch about the market, an early walk, and making some tiny things.

This week it’s half term and there’s only three days in work thanks to some Queen or other having a jubilee. The village has broken out in bunting already. I have promised my beloved that I’ll sort out my shed next weekend….

See you next week!

Kirsty x

The Betrayal of Trust/The Various Haunts of Men – Susan Hill

Villager – Tom Cox