Jackdaws are preparing to roost at Eldwick Crag in West Yorkshire as dusk descends on the moors. Richard Smyth observed these birds enjoying the high wind and blustery weather. While the flock gathered above the trees, the author also spotted a barn owl and other wildlife during the evening walk.
Eldwick Crag, West Yorkshire: In the low light and the high wind, these corvids are preparing to roost for the night. And they seem to be enjoying themselves
Jackdaws like blustery weather the same way dolphins love choppy seas. There are faster flyers and more graceful flyers, but I can't think of a bird that just enjoys flying as much as a jackdaw does. They bob and bank and yaw and wheel. And right now it's roosting time in the copse above the quarry.
A jackdaw roost - or rather the prelude to the roost, the bedtime gathering, the swirl of small, clacking crows above and about the trees, like particles about to be drawn into a plughole - isn't a murmuration. It's neither as spectacular nor as enigmatic as the twilight displays of starlings; it's a flock, plain and simple (plain as the jackdaw's call of its own name, "jack"). But like everything jackdaws do, it's full of bustling, garrulous life.
Behind the jackdaws, the evening sky is a deep, soft pink. We've left behind the belted galloway cows and calves browsing watchfully on the upward meadow slopes, and now, as we pick our way north, we throw tall shadows sidelong across the bracken. Ahead of us, on the moor, the faded heather is copper-coloured in the late sun. Linnets come zipping overhead, high on the wind. A red grouse does its noisy gottle-of-geer act (we're on the south brink of a sprawling grouse estate here).
My son picks out three small honey waxcap toadstools in the grass, like nuggets of unpolished gold - no, we can't eat them ("reputed to be edible but of poor quality", I read later). And then, further along, I have to steer him and his sister a little way wide of the path, as the long body of a dead hare is stretched out on the peat, partly plucked, the eye sockets empty. Jackdaws and their crow kin aren't always playful.
On the way home, with the day almost all gone, a white ghost of the dusk, a barn owl, comes shearing through the twilight ahead of us, following a purposeful line of pursuit into the undergrowth on the flank of the hill. A different kind of bird flight: all business.