J Ack:DAWS Jackdaws are, to me at any rate, much
more in- teresting birds than mere crows. They are enter- Prising, busier about their daily lives altogether than the greater corvidx. They have a restlessness that marks the magpie and birds against which so many hands are turned. They also, at times, seem to have something slightly hysterical in their acrobatic be- haviour. I watched a colony of 'daws in the air Yesterday morning. These birds normally live in the ivied cliff above my father's house, but at times they are absent for whole days, leaving the territory to two carrion crows—a pair that robbed the chicken-run twice this summer. On this occasion they were 'at home' and enjoying themselves in the sunlight. The air was filled with diving, gliding and twisting jackdaws and the sound of their excited conversation. There was no dignity in it all. They left that to the two crows, sailing and planing high above them and giving a hoarse croak now and then. By contrast a carrion crow is a sober bird quite incapable of that lightness of heart that takes a jackdaw colony into the sunlight of an autumn morning, While I watched, someone fired a gun on one of the market- garden strips down below. The crows sailed off along the cliff, but the 'daws clustered into the ivy and fell silent, the spell broken.
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