If the gulls don’t get the scraps, the jackdaws do. Since I moved here, a family of them have lived at the top of my chimney. I have had a cage installed on the chimney now to protect them, but for a while their situation was a worry. In 2014 a fledgling dropped down into the empty grate then sat happily on my arm for an afternoon before I climbed onto the roof and placed him near his family, only for him to be annihilated by a sparrowhawk. Then there was the adult who fell into a roaring conflagration of my dad’s best logs two years later. I was in the kitchen making a cup of tea at the time, but my friends Rachel and Seventies Pat saw the jackdaw fall into the flames.
‘Tom! Tom! Get in here! Quick!’ shouted Rachel and Seventies Pat, who did not have fires, or jackdaws, in their houses. I rushed into the room, half-expecting to find the room ablaze, but instead found a confused bird flapping around the room’s perimeter. I dived and caught it then took the jackdaw outside, where it hopped around looking dazed for twenty seconds, before flying up into the boughs of the Scots pine in the garden. The situation could have been much worse, and everyone felt relieved – not least the jackdaw, I imagine.
‘Do you think it’s OK?’ asked Rachel.
‘Yeah, it seems to be pretty much still a full jackdaw,’ I replied.
‘Full jackdaw,’ said Rachel. ‘Thank God.’
We drank a little too much wine that night, and the next morning I asked Seventies Pat how he was feeling.
‘Surprisingly fine,’ he replied. ‘Pretty much full jackdaw.’
The three of us were up before dawn the day after that, which was 1 May, to watch the morris dancers at Totnes Castle and the sun coming up over the hills near Brixham: the light, accompanying the singing of ‘Hal-an-Tow’, the old Helston May Day song, could hardly have been more perfect.
‘That was great,’ said Rachel. ‘Full jackdaw!’
Later, the three of us planned a walk beside the river, where the footpaths were still muddy after heavy April rainfall, and I asked Seventies Pat – who is never out of 1971 dandy uniform – if he had brought any proper walking boots.
‘I’ve bought my walking cowboy boots,’ said Seventies Pat. ‘Does that count?’
I let out a sigh.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he reassured me. ‘I’m full jackdaw.’
Jackdaws are often written off as ruffians or villains, with their old-fashioned burglar cartoon masks and egg-stealing habit, but in flight they’re no less serene or beautiful than any other bird. They will dive-bomb down my chimney pot towards my lawn then flip and turn at right angles for the trees behind the hedge; air poetry delivered at speed. The collective noun for them is a clattering, which goes a fair way to summing up the busy, almost metallic sound they often make in full gang mode. When I was asleep last summer with my bedroom window wide open and one landed on the sill behind my head and squawked, the effect was not dissimilar to someone sneaking up behind me and clanging two iron poles together as a practical joke. Jackdaws are rarely alone, though. Not for them the spontaneous bohemian life of the unshackled blackbird. Their existence is centred around punctilious, community-based organisation. Groups are frequently known to fly into farmland, each pick an individual sheep to land on and delouse, then leave. Sheep are rarely heard to complain about this. When I round the corner of my house and startle three or four jackdaws eating the food I’ve left out for them they still make the effort to take off in formation, as if the allotted leader among them has said, ‘One, two, three . . . go!’ They also mate for life, even when they’re unhappy with each other or struggling to have children together, a trait that seems both admirable and a bit self-defeatingly 1950s of them. When I looked into the eyes of that fledgling I briefly befriended I saw a human intelligence that I’ve not seen in the eyes of any other bird with the possible exception of two or three particularly lugubrious parrots.
A Scottish man called Norman who I met at an owl club in Torbay told me that in his 1950s boyhood on the edge of the Cairngorms he and his friends would often foster various types of orphan crows. The jackdaws were always the most responsive and bright of the lot. ‘One boy had a jackdaw who’d follow him to school, then wait on the roof for him until lessons were over,’ Norman said. Bending to kiss the beak of his African spotted eagle owl Ellie, he told me he now preferred to spend time around owls, and that doing so had aided his recovery after suffering a stroke a few years ago. I had been invited to owl club by Pete, who I first met in Totnes when he was walking around town with an owl called Wizard from the local rare breeds farm. Pete is one of two men regularly seen around Totnes walking owls, but it is genuinely perceived that he is the more authentic, since he was the first to take owls around the town, and the other man’s owls are smaller. Being invited to owl club felt like a privilege, especially as I was to be the sole person in attendance who didn’t have their own owl, so I thought it was the least I could do to wear my best shoes. Within a matter of seconds, however, the shoes were in jeopardy. An owl had defecated very close to the entrance to owl club, and I found myself weaving, last minute, to dodge the owl poo, swivelling and swerving in a move
