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Jackdaw
The '''Jackdaw''' (''Corvus monedula''), sometimes known as the '''Eurasian Jackdaw''', '''European Jackdaw''', or formerly simply the '''daw''', is one of the smallest species (34–39 centimetre|cm in length) in the genus of crows and ravens. It is a black-plumaged bird with grey nape and distinctive white irises. Like all corvids, it is omnivorous. It is found across Europe, western Asia and North Africa. Four subspecies are currently recognised.
Taxonomy
The Jackdaw was one of the many species originally described by Carolus Linnaeus|Linnaeus in his 18th century work, ''Systema Naturae'', and it still bears its original name of ''Corvus monedula''.[ ] The species name ''monedula'' is the Latin for jackdaw.[Swan, H. Kirke. ''A Dictionary of English and Folk-Names of British Birds, With their History, Meaning and first usage: and the Folk-lore, Weather-lore, Legends, etc., relating to the more familiar species.'' London: Witherby and Co. 1913.][Wright, Joseph. ''The English Dialect Dictionary.'' Six volumes. London: Henry Frowde. 1898--1905.][Swainson, Charles. ''Provincial Names and Folk Lore of British Birds.'' London: Trübner and Co., 1885.][Lars Svensson et al., ''Collins Bird Guide.'' London: HarperCollins, 1999. 335]
An archaic collective noun for a group of jackdaws is a "clattering".[First recorded in Lydgate's ''Debate between the Horse, Goose and Sheep'', c.1430, as "A clatering of chowhis", and then in Juliana Berners ''Book of St. Albans'', c.1480, as "a Clateryng of choughes."] Another term used is "train,"[Gilbert White. ''The Natural Nistory of Selborne.'' London: N. Hailes, 1833. p. 163.] however, in practice, most people use the more generic term "flock".
Subspecies
There are four recognised subspecies[Lars Svensson et al., ''Collins Bird Guide.'' London: HarperCollins, 1999.]
- nominate ''monedula'' (Linnaeus, 1758) breeding in south-east Norway, southern Sweden and northern and eastern Denmark, with occasional wintering birds in England and France; has pale nape and side of the neck, dark throat, light grey partial collar of variable extent;
- ''spermologus'' (Vieillot, 1817) of west and central Europe, wintering to the Canary Islands and Corsica; darker in colour and lacks grey collar
- ''soemmerringii'' (Fischer, 1811) of north-east Europe, and north and central Asia, from former Soviet Union to Lake Baikal and north-west Mongolia and south to Turkey, Israel and the eastern Himalayas, and winters in Iran and NW India (Kashmir); distinguished by paler nape and side of the neck creating a contrasting black crown, and lighter grey partial collar;
- ''cirtensis'' (Rothschild and Hartert, 1912) of N Africa (Morocco and Algeria)
Monedula integrates into ''soemmerringii'' with the transition zone running from Finland south across the Baltic, east Poland to Romania and Croatia.Description
Measuring 34–39 centimetre|cm (14-15 inch|in), the jackdaw is the smallest species in the genus ''Corvus''. Most of the plumage is black or greyish black except for the cheeks, nape and neck, which are light grey to greyish silver. The iris of adults is greyish white or silvery white, the only member of the genus outside of the Australasian region to have this feature. The iris of juvenile jackdaws is light blue.
Voice
The call is a metallic ''"chyak-chyak"'' or ''"kak-kak"''.
Distribution and habitat
Jackdaws are found over a large area stretching from North West Africa through virtually all of Europe, including the British Isles, Turkey, Iran, north-west India, the Caucasus and Siberia, through central Asia to the eastern Himalayas and Lake Baikal. They inhabit wooded steppes, woodland, cultivated land, pasture, coastal cliffs and villages and towns.
Jackdaws are mostly resident, but the northern and eastern populations are more migratory.[John L. Dunn and Jonanthan Alderfer, ''National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America.'' 5th ed. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2006. p. 326]
Behavior
The bird is sociable, moving around in pairs (male and female) or in larger groups, though pairs stay together within flocks. During migration jackdaws often accompany rook (bird)| rooks ''Corvus frugilegus''.
Like magpies, jackdaws are known to steal shiny objects such as jewelry to hoard in nests.
Feeding
The jackdaw mostly takes food from the ground but does take some food in trees.
In terms of animal food, jackdaws tend to feed upon small invertebrates found above ground between 2 and 18 mm in length, including imagines, larvae and pupae of Curculionidae, Coleoptera, Diptera and Lepidoptera. Snails, spiders and some other insects also make up part of their animal diet. Unlike rooks and carrion crows, jackdaws do not generally feed on carrion, though they will eat stranded fish on the shore. The vegetal diet of jackdaws consists of farm grains (barley, wheat and oats), seeds of weeds, elderberries, acorns and various cultivated fruits.[J. D. Lockie "The Food and Feeding Behaviour of the Jackdaw, Rook and Carrion Crow." ''The Journal of Animal Ecology.'' 25:2 (Nov., 1956), pp. 421-428.] Jackdaws also take scraps of human food in towns, and will more readily take food from bird tables than other ''Corvus'' species.
Jackdaws employ various feeding methods, such as jumping, pecking, clod-turning and scattering, probing the soil, and rarely digging. Flies around cow pats are caught by jumping from the ground or at times by dropping vertically from a few metres above onto the cow pat. Earthworms are not usually extracted from the ground by jackdaws but are eaten from freshly plough soil.[J. D. Lockie "The Food and Feeding Behaviour of the Jackdaw, Rook and Carrion Crow." ''The Journal of Animal Ecology.'' 25:2 (Nov., 1956), pp. 421-428.]
Breeding
Jackdaws usually nest in colonies in cavities of trees, cliffs or ruined and sometimes inhabited buildings, usually in chimneys, and even in dense conifers. They are also famous for using church steeples for nesting, a fact reported in verse by William Cowper
A great frequenter of the church,
Where, bishoplike, he finds a perch,
And dormitory too.[''The Poetical Works of William Cowper.'' Vol. 2. London: William Pickering, 1853. p. 336.]
Nests are usually constructed by a mated pair blocking up the crevice by dropping sticks into it; the nest is then built atop the platform formed.[Wilmore, S. Bruce. ''Crows, jays, ravens and their relatives.'' London: David and Charles Ltd, 1977] This behaviour has led to blocked chimneys and even nests, with the jackdaw present, crashing down into fireplaces.[Greenoak, F. ''All the birds of the air; the names, lore and literature of British birds.'' London: Book Club Associates, 1979] Nest platforms can attain great size - John Mason Neale notes that a "Clerk was allowed by the Churchwarden to have for his own use all that the caddows had brought into the Tower: and he took home, at one time, two cart-loads of good firewood, besides a great quantity of rubbish which he threw away."[Gilbert White. ''The Natural Nistory of Selborne.'' London: N. Hailes, 1833. pp. 68-69.]
Nests are lined with hair, rags, bark, soil, and many other materials. Jackdaws nest in colonies and often close to rook (bird)|rooks.[David Wingfield Gibbons. 'Hatching Asynchrony Reduces Parental Investment in the Jackdaw.' ''Journal of Animal Ecology'' (1987) 53: 403-414.]
Social behavior
The jackdaw is a highly sociable species outside of the breeding season, occurring in flocks that can contain hundreds of birds.[Wilmore, S. Bruce. ''Crows, jays, ravens and their relatives.'' London: David and Charles Ltd, 1977]
Konrad Lorenz studied the complex social interactions that occur in groups of jackdaws and published his detailed observations of their social behavior in his book ''King Solomon's Ring (nonfiction)|King Solomon's Ring''. To study jackdaws, Lorenz put coloured rings on the legs of the jackdaws that lived around his house in Sankt Andrä-Wördern|Altenberg, Austria for identification, and he caged them in the winter because of their annual Bird migration|migration away from Austria. His book describes his observations on jackdaws' Dominance hierarchy|hierarchical group structure, in which the higher-ranking birds are dominant over lower ranked birds. The book also records his observations on jackdaws' strong male–female bonding; he noted that each bird of a pair both have about the same rank in the hierarchy, and that a low-ranked female jackdaw rocketed up the jackdaw social ladder when she became the mate of a high-ranking male.
Jackdaws have been observed sharing food and objects. The active giving of food is rare in primates, and in birds is found mainly in the context of parental care and courtship. Jackdaws show much higher levels of active giving than documented for chimpanzees. The function of this behaviour is not fully understood, although it has been found to be compatible with hypotheses of mutualism, reciprocity and harassment avoidance.[''Frequent food- and object-sharing during jackdaw (Corvus monedula) socialisation'', http://www.behav.org/IEC/default.php?proc=search&search=a_num&id=406.]
Occasionally the flock makes 'mercy killings', in which a sick or injured bird is mobbed until it is killed.[Wilmore, S. Bruce. ''Crows, jays, ravens and their relatives.'' London: David and Charles Ltd, 1977]
Cultural depictions and folklore
In some cultures, a jackdaw on the roof is said to predict a new arrival; alternatively, a jackdaw settling on the roof of a house or flying down a chimney is an omen of death and coming across one is considered a bad omen.[Swainson, Charles. ''Provincial Names and Folk Lore of British Birds.'' London: Trübner and Co., 1885.]
In several stories from Aesop's Fables the jackdaw is referenced. Such stories are: "The Jackdaw and the Doves", "The Eagle and the Jackdaw", "The Escaped Jackdaw", "The Eagle, the Jackdaw and the Shepherd", and "The Jackdaw and His Borrowed Feathers".
Other ancient Greek authors tell how a jackdaw, being a social creature, may be caught with a dish of oil which it falls into while looking at its own reflection.[D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, ''A Glossary of Greek Birds.'' Oxford, 1895. p. 89.]
Pliny the Elder|Pliny notes how the Thessalians, Illyrians and Lemnians cherished jackdaws for destroying grasshoppers' eggs. The Veneti are fabled to have bribed the jackdaws to spare their crops.[D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, ''A Glossary of Greek Birds.'' Oxford, 1895. p. 90.]
An ancient Greek and Roman adage runs "The swans will sing when the jackdaws are silent" meaning that educated people will speak after prattlers finally run out of talk.[''Collected Works of Erasmus: Adages: Ivi1 to Ix100.'' Translated by Roger A. Mynors. University of Toronto Press, 1989. p. 314.]
In Shakespeare's ''Much Ado About Nothing'' (1600), Beatrice says to Benedict, "Yea, just so much as you may take upon a knive's point, and choke a daw withal." (Act II, Scene 3)
In Shakespeare's ''Othello'' (1603), "But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at..."
The best known poem of ''The Ingoldsby Legends'' (1837) is "The Jackdaw of Rheims", about a jackdaw who steals a cardinal's ring and is made a saint.
In Edward Lear|Edward Lear's poem ''The Jumblies'', from his ''Nonsense Songs and Stories'' (1871) the Jumblies buy "a pig, and some green Jackdaws, / And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws".
In Gilbert and Sullivan's ''HMS Pinafore'' (1878), the song "Things Are Seldom What They Seem", by the character Buttercup, begins "Things are seldom what they seem, / Skim milk masquerades as cream; / Highlows pass as patent leathers; / Jackdaws strut in peacock's feathers" - a reference to the Aesop fable.
In ''The Magician's Nephew'' (1955), by C.S. Lewis, the newly-speaking jackdaw becomes the first butt of a joke in a recently founded Narnia.
In Milan Kundera|Milan Kundera's ''The Book of Laughter and Forgetting'' (1979), Kundera notes that Hermann Kafka, father to Franz Kafka had a sign in front of his shop with a jackdaw painted next to his name, since ''kavka'' means ''jackdaw'' in Czech.
In Brian Jacques|Brian Jacques' ''The Pearls of Lutra'' (1996), Ninian's Church is infested with jackdaws, and some kill a young mousemaid named Piknim.
In ''Someplace to be Flying'' (1998), by Charles de Lint, one of the main animal-people characters, Jack, is a jackdaw. His character is the 'story-teller' of the animal-people and is depicted as compassionate, sharing and influential; characteristics anthropomorphically assigned to jackdaws.
Pink Floyd's Roger Waters references a jackdaw in his song "Flickering Flame" (1996).
Popular author Ken Follett has a book titled ''Jackdaws'' (2001), set in France and England during World War Two.
The sentence "Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz" is a commonly used example of a pangram, (i.e. a sentence that contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet), while the sentence itself is only 31 letters long.[Fun with words]
External links
- Jackdaw videos on the Internet Bird Collection
- Oiseaux Pictures
- Ageing and sexing (PDF) by Javier Blasco-Zumeta
- http://www.myspace.com/jackvondaw
References
Category:Corvus
Category:Birds of Europe
Category:Birds of Pakistan
Category:Birds of Turkey
Category:British Isles coastal fauna
Related Images- fledgling
Sources: StartLearningNow, Wikipedia | Usage license: GNU FDL
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