WikiPortallus: Jackdaw.html

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 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 Linnaeus in his 18th century work, Systema Naturae, and it still bears its original name of Corvus monedula.² The species name monedula is the Latin for jackdaw.³

The common name jackdaw first appears in the 16th century, and is a compound of the forename Jack used in animal names to signify a small form (e.g. jack-snipe) and the native English word daw. Formerly jackdaws were simply called daws (the only form in Shakespeare). Claims that the metallic chyak call is the origin of the jack part of the common name⁴ are not supported by the Oxford English Dictionary.⁵

Daw is first attested in the 15th century, which the Oxford English Dictionary conjectures to be derived from an unattested Old English dawe, citing cognates in Old High German tâha, Middle High German tâhe and modern German dialect dähi, däche, dacha.

The original Old English name was ceo (pronounced with initial ch). Though now reserved for corvids of the genus Pyrrhocorax the word chough originally referred to the jackdaw.

English dialect names are numerous. Scottish and north England dialect has had ka or kae since the 14th century. The midlands form of this was co or coo. Caddow is potentially a compound of ka and dow, a variant of daw. Other dialect or obsolete names include caddesse, cawdaw, caddy, chauk, college-bird (from dialect college = cathedral), jackerdaw, jacko, ka-wattie, chimney-sweep bird, from their nesting propensities, and sea-crow, from their frequenting coasts. It was also frequently known quasi-nominally as Jack.⁶⁷⁸⁹

An archaic collective noun for a group of jackdaws is a "clattering".¹⁰ Another term used is "train,"¹¹ however, in practice, most people use the more generic term "flock".

Subspecies

Monedula integrates into soemmerringii with the transition zone running from Finland south across the Baltic, east Poland to Romania and Croatia.¹⁴

Description

Measuring 34–39 cm (14-15 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

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.¹⁵

A small number of Jackdaws reached the northwest of North America in the 1980s, presumedly ship-assisted, and have been found from Atlantic Canada to Pennsylvania.¹⁶

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 rooks Corvus frugilegus.

Like magpies, jackdaws are known to steal shiny objects such as jewelry to hoard in nests.

Feeding

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.¹⁷ 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.¹⁸

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

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.²⁰ This behaviour has led to blocked chimneys and even nests, with the jackdaw present, crashing down into fireplaces.²¹ 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."²²

Gilbert White, in his popular book The Natural History of Selborne, notes that jackdaws used to nest in crevices beneath the lintels of Stonehenge, and describes a curious example of jackdaws using rabbit burrows for nest sites.²³

Nests are lined with hair, rags, bark, soil, and many other materials. Jackdaws nest in colonies and often close to rooks.²⁴ The eggs are smooth, glossy pale blue speckled with dark brown, measuring approximately 36 x 26 mm. Clutches of normally 4-5 eggs, are incubated by the female for 17-18 days and fledge after 28-35 days, when they are fed by both parents.²⁵

Jackdaws hatch asynchronously and incubation begins before clutch completion, often leading to the death of the last-hatched young. The young which die in the nest do so quickly which minimises parental investment, and hence the brood size comes to fit the available food supply.²⁶

Social behavior

The jackdaw is a highly sociable species outside of the breeding season, occurring in flocks that can contain hundreds of birds.²⁷

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. To study jackdaws, Lorenz put coloured rings on the legs of the jackdaws that lived around his house in Altenberg, Austria for identification, and he caged them in the winter because of their annual migration away from Austria. His book describes his observations on jackdaws' 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.²⁸

Occasionally the flock makes 'mercy killings', in which a sick or injured bird is mobbed until it is killed.²⁹

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.³⁰ A jackdaw standing on the vanes of a cathedral tower is meant to prognosticate rain. Czech superstition formerly held that if jackdaws are seen quarrelling, war will follow, and that jackdaws will not build nests at Sázava having been banished by Saint Procopius.³¹

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.³²

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.³³

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.³⁴

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'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 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.³⁵

External links

References

^ BirdLife International (2004). Corvus monedula. 2006 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN 2006. Retrieved on 12 May 2006.
^ (Latin) Linnaeus, C (1758). Systema naturae per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis. Tomus I. Editio decima, reformata.. Holmiae. (Laurentii Salvii)., 105.
^ Simpson, D.P. (1979). Cassell's Latin Dictionary, 5, London: Cassell Ltd., 883. ISBN 0-304-52257-0.
^ "British Garden Birds: Jackdaw".
^ "Oxford English Dictionary: Jackdaw. 2nd ed. 1989".
^ 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
^ 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."
^ Gilbert White. The Natural Nistory of Selborne. London: N. Hailes, 1833. p. 163.
^ "http://www.globaltwitcher.com/artspec.asp?thingid=26248 GlobalTwitcher.com: Eurasian Jackdaw Corvus monedula]".
^ Lars Svensson et al., Collins Bird Guide. London: HarperCollins, 1999.
^ "Identification and occurrence of "Eastern" Jackdaws in the Netherlands".
^ "Identification and occurrence of "Eastern" Jackdaws in the Netherlands".
^ 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
^ 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.
^ 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.
^ The Poetical Works of William Cowper. Vol. 2. London: William Pickering, 1853. p. 336.
^ Wilmore, S. Bruce. Crows, jays, ravens and their relatives. London: David and Charles Ltd, 1977
^ Greenoak, F. All the birds of the air; the names, lore and literature of British birds. London: Book Club Associates, 1979
^ "[John Mason Neale A Few Words to Parish Clerks and Sextons of Country Parishes. London: Joseph Masters, 1846.]".
^ Gilbert White. The Natural Nistory of Selborne. London: N. Hailes, 1833. pp. 68-69.
^ "British Garden Birds: Jackdaw".
^ "British Garden Birds: Jackdaw".
^ David Wingfield Gibbons. 'Hatching Asynchrony Reduces Parental Investment in the Jackdaw.' Journal of Animal Ecology (1987) 53: 403-414.
^ Wilmore, S. Bruce. Crows, jays, ravens and their relatives. London: David and Charles Ltd, 1977
^ Frequent food- and object-sharing during jackdaw (Corvus monedula) socialisation, [1].
^ Wilmore, S. Bruce. Crows, jays, ravens and their relatives. London: David and Charles Ltd, 1977
^ "Old superstitions: Jackdaw".
^ Swainson, Charles. Provincial Names and Folk Lore of British Birds. London: Trübner and Co., 1885.
^ D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, A Glossary of Greek Birds. Oxford, 1895. p. 89.
^ D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, A Glossary of Greek Birds. Oxford, 1895. p. 90.
^ Collected Works of Erasmus: Adages: Ivi1 to Ix100. Translated by Roger A. Mynors. University of Toronto Press, 1989. p. 314.
^ Fun with words

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