Jackdaw

2 sec / 7 kb

All pictures on this page are thumbnails. Click on a thumbnail for an enlargement of usually some 800x600 pixels. The enlarged photos vary from 50 to 150KB in size.

The small and impertinent Jackdaw more and more feels at home in larger cities.*

A small black member of the Jay family. Every now and then the bird appears in my back garden, though it normally remains in the bushy part of it. These are very intelligent birds. In winter they flock together and are often joined by Rooks. In summer they normally keep apart, although they also look for food in the open fields in small flocks. The bird is more popular than the Crow is, because the noise it makes is less irritating and certainly less frequent.

Yet it is very common in the country side.

In my neighborhood farmers used to take away one Jackdaw chick from a nest. They would then raise the chick by hand and they had a tame bird! It would even walk inside the house and it would follow the farmer where ever he went. A tame bird would have a wild one as a partner, so the farmer had to take out another chick after a few years. They are awful thieves of glittering stuff, just like the Magpie. When taming a Jackdaw one should take care of one's eyes: they glitter as well and a Jackdaw could try to take one to the nest. Oh, well, who cares, people do have two eyes anyway!

This bird belongs to the family of Crows (Corvidae). It is very rare in our garden and can be seen in Holland all year round. The bird is 13" and weighs 240 grams. It lives in parks, ruines and bushy areas mostly. It eats almost everything. The sexes do not differ from one another. Jackdaws often live in small colonies. These colonies have a strict social order, a clear leader and conflicts like all societies have. Ornithologists have examined the Jackdaw's language and found out at least 8 "words"... The species breeds in may and june. It is a holebreeder that deposits four to six eggs. The breeding time is some 18 days, but the parents have to look after their young for an exceptional long time: 30 to 35 days!

* These pictures were not taken in our garden. The picture to the left was taken in Leiden, Holland, the one to the right in Gdansk, Poland.