A Corvid During COVID - Jackdaws

-

 We have a few crow like birds that visit us. These birds can sometimes be difficult to tell apart but one of the easiest to recognise is probably the jackdaw.


This bird is described in my book as having an inky black face with a grey "shawl" and a whitish eye. The clinching feature usually is the grey nape of the neck but this is not obvious at a distance or in poor light. The situation is further complicated by the fact that jackdaws frequently flock, and roost with rooks. Picking out a juvenile jackdaw from a group of distant rooks is beyond my skill level.


Jackdaws build nests with a messy collection of twigs. I moved into a house in Scotland a few years ago and when I first lit the fire the house filled with smoke because a jackdaw nest had blocked at least 3m of chimney and the birds have a reputation for this. Jackdaws are gregarious and vocal and live in complex family groups. Jackdaws seem to like the farmland around us. During the mating season the birds (which are monogamous) can get aggressive. One year we were away for a couple of weeks and one jackdaw had got used to the house being unoccupied. This bird had got himself into a frenzy and had learned to peck furiously at the reflection of himself in our windows.  We hung streamers and tried to make the windows opaque but we suffered an entire month of furious pecking. In the days when windows were held in place with putty the birds would peck out the putty.
Jackdaws are intelligent and have the same interest in shiny things as their relatives the magpie. Jackdaws were the subject of study by the famous biologist Konrad Lorenz (see his book "King Solomon's Ring) which reveals that the birds have a complicated hierarchical structure.

Diary Notes
It rained all day yesterday and apart from rooks and jackdaws foraging in the field next door, and a visit to the feeders by a flock of long tailed tits we didn't see much. Overnight cameras show fox, badger, and polecat. I posted images of our polecats on the Cumbrian Mammals Facebook site and they provoked some debate. Opinions are divided as to whether what I am seeing are untainted wild polecats or escaped feral ferrets. Apparently this comes down to the amount of black "mask" on the face. I can't get too excited about it; I am pleased to see them and no doubt if they are feral ferrets they will eventually revert to type as a ferret is just a domesticated polecat.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Dunnock

-
Image
 When I was a boy my first bird book described "hedge sparrows" but at some time in the last 50 years this name has all but disappeared and these birds are now called dunnocks (as they are not closely related to House and Tree Sparrows) Its easy to miss a dunnock! They are little brown birds and they tend to feed on the ground and keep to the cover of vegetation if they can. The males are territorial and the birds pair up in the spring. The pair are not strictly monogamous and the female will mate with another male if she gets the chance. DNA testing reveals that a brood often has more than one father. The male dunnocks are alert to this possibility and can sometimes be seen pecking at the cloacal opening of the female in an attempt to get her to expel the sperm of the competitor. The sexes look alike and these birds are common and widespread in Britain. The males get involved in feeding young according to their breeding success so it is common to find two males and one femal...
Read more

White Clawed Crayfish

-
Image
 I went for a walk yesterday that took me along the Scandal Beck (a tributary of the River Eden). On the banks of the river was a stone that had obviously been used as a picnic table by an otter and the remains of his meal were strewn about. A recognisable part of the leftovers is shown below. It's clear that this claw comes from a white clawed crayfish. These animals are not common in the UK as they need the water to be rich in calcium. This requirement is fulfilled in the Eden valley by the limestone substrate. I think that the River Eden is as far North as theses animals get. I know that there are crayfish in this part of the system because for a number of years I have volunteered with the Eden Rivers Trust to survey them. It was not uncommon to find a couple of hundred animals in a 300m stretch of river. The following images give an indication of scale. In recent years the population of the native white clawed crayfish has been threatened by the arrival of the invasive signal (...
Read more

Otters

-
 Well another Covid lockdown! As I am confined to the local area I have been having a closer look at the local wildlife. I treated myself to a trail cam and started to see what I could find. After a couple of experimental sessions to get to know the kit I set the camera along a fence line by an old railway track. On the first night I was astonished to get footage of an otter carrying a rabbit! The site is at least 500m from a watercourse which is a drainage ditch that eventually flows into a tiny tributary of the River Eden I hadn't realised that otters eat anything other than fish but apparently they do. I wonder why the otter was carrying the rabbit rather than eating it where it was found. Perhaps it was feeding young? Apparently ottters have young throughout the year. I have only seen an otter near the house once before and that was a late night encounter in the car headlights.
Read more