Jackdaws on the Roof

Portrait with noisy neighbours

Friends,

This week’s post is a free story in praise of my noisy neighbours - the jackdaws. I feel that part of the work in writing about the wild should be a form of praise poetry. Though this story doesn’t hit the heights of a poem it’s certainly in praise of the noisy little critters.

An audio version of the story is available as a podcast episode for RIMA subscribers by clicking the button below. Jackdaws were once well known for their abilities in human speech mimicry and are supposedly as talented as parrots when trained properly. Unfortunately I’m not a skilled language teacher, so I was unable to get a jackdaw to read it . . . It will be my voice you hear.

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J

We’re surrounded! The jackdaws are nesting in every hole in the chimneys and eaves - and in the old part of Kington there are many of those. The house opposite ours is in a beautiful state of disrepair. It’s an old barn, still half a barn now as far as I can tell, with rotting oak doors, cracked walls and chimneys which seem to list a little further every day. There are at least eight pairs of jackdaws nesting in its roof. They come and go all day, purring and shrieking, the young constantly demanding food. When the hermit who lives nearby throws bread onto his porch roof they land as one, squabbling and pecking at each other. I’m sure that white bread is no good at all for jackdaw chicks.

They’re so busy raising their young at the moment that they don’t flock in the evenings, something I love to watch. It goes something like the following. As dusk slowly floods the yards and gardens they gather at the top of a tall pine opposite. They sit in silence for a while, conversing telepathically, no doubt. Then a trigger is pulled somewhere inside them and they flow out over the roofs, chattering madly, spiralling up and over the town, diving back towards the roost before deciding against it and pouring out again. Noisy birds, they shatter the quiet in the best of ways. How I love them. How I would miss them if they weren’t here.

Jackdaws and rooks should always be near. The house we used to live in overlooked a rookery. In nearby Hay the castle grounds has a stand of trees which become a stage for jackdaws every evening. Probably one evening a week I spent half-an-hour walking around the castle walls, watching them until they disappeared quietly into the night, a subsidence which perfectly matched the fading light. When I first agreed to rent the studio in Rhayader I almost reached a state of panic when I looked out over the town and saw neither rooks nor jackdaws, just the ubiquitous kites. Then, walking back to the car I saw a stand of trees nearby, clotted with rooks’ nests, a little flock of jackdaws perched above. And when we go to the coast at St David’s we always find a place to stay which is within earshot of a huge jackdaw roost overlooking the town square. I’m thinking of asking AirBnB to make it a filter on their website: Corvids nearby. Forget the wifi and the laundry room!

There’s a kind of perfection in the shape of a jackdaw. Not that there isn’t in other corvids. I once got up close and personal with a huge raven on a Welsh island, a bird so black, so shimmering, so simultaneously shadowy and luminescent I was obliged to bow. But, there’s always something cracked and rickety about a raven, a delicious impurity. Rooks are the peasants of the corvid world - the naked nosed crows. Though beautiful they look a little too care worn, too lived in. Crows, of course, don’t really exist, they’re just black splinters in reality. Jays live up the hill in that place we’re all a little embarrassed about. They’re show-offs, demanding soooooo much attention with all their hues and shades, their low to the ground aerobatics. It’s nothing but me me me with jays. Magpies are similarly extroverted: smart and on trend, formal even, but loud mouthed and given to brawling. I’m sure they drink. Jackdaws, to me, have a purity. Their silvery hoods and ice pale eyes make them devilishly angelic.

There is a noisy gang of jackdaws in the wood at the moment, staking out a spot near to the car park for the ornamental garden next door. When the dogs and I pass below them they shout at us and ping from tree to tree, shooing us off. I’m not sure what their plan is, but they’re up to no good. A week ago I found one of them upside down in the branches of a young hazel tree, open-eyed and only just dead, perhaps assassinated. This mature bird was in perfect shape, with glossy feathers, polished beak and exquisitely detailed legs and feet, each talon a black new moon. I stopped and stroked its hood for a while, checking for signs of life. There were none. It was as if it had simply dropped out of the sky, the bright streamer of its life cut mid-air. When you’re post mid-life you’ve witnessed deaths and encountered corpses, whether in supermarkets, butcher’s shops, on the sides of roads, or in gardens, funeral parlours, bedrooms. When a being passes from life to death gravity takes them. They deflate and become ragged, even in the instant after their passing. There seems to be little transition. A switch is flicked off. Not the jackdaw. It was still shining somehow, still vital. I left it where it was, not wanting to disturb the bird. I felt that it was still here. A day later it still was. A day after that it wasn’t.

I’ve never tried to tame a wild bird or even befriend one. An old lady I sometimes talk to has befriended a red kite, which she’s trained to perch on the back of her garden chair while she feeds it. It waits for her every afternoon at the same time, tame as a shift worker. As much as I’d like to be that close to a wild thing it doesn’t seem quite right to me. A few months ago I walked past a farmhouse and a horse was peering out of the kitchen door. Not the stable door, the kitchen door. This also doesn’t seem quite right. My horse lives out all year round. Put him in a stable and he loses his shit. Even tame animals prefer the wild, of that I’m certain. I do like to see the wild close up, but I want distance between us, a repellant, two magnets opposed. I want to preserve it and to do that I need to stay back.

It’s early in the morning and the lane near our house is empty. No engine or tyre noise, no people talking as they go to work. I can hear the leaf hush of the copper beech tree above. I think I just heard the high shriek of a swift, there are so few of them this summer. Then the skitter and tap of bird feet, one pair, then two, then ten or more. Those feet are only inches from my head in this loft room, closer to me than my own feet. We cohabit, the jackdaws and I. We’re distant strangers. We’re good neighbours.

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Found Things

I’ve always thought that any attempt to create a synthetic, self-sustaining biosphere would be impossible in the long term given the huge amount of variables involved in managing and preserving any ecosystem. Mark Nelson and a team of scientists and engineers attempted this with the Biosphere 2 project in the 90s, a project I’ve never taken much notice of because of its spaceship, off world connotations. I’m an on-worlder. But this conversation with the always fascinating Chris Ryan of the Tangentially Speaking podcast is rich and rewarding. Nelson’s positivity, optimism and obvious deep commitment to the natural world and the human capacity to enrich, rather than impoverish it, is inspiring. The podcast is paywalled but Ryan’s conversations dig deep and it’s well worth a subscription to listen in to his archive of over 600 episodes.

613 - Mark Nelson (Biospherian)

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Artwork of the week - Staring Wolf

Framed original painting now available (with a 15% discount for RIMA subscribers).

Until next week,

J