Jackdaw Wars

Ending chicken incarceration brings new problems

I have kept various numbers of chickens for the last 25 years. Not posh breeds with impressive feathers, I’ve usually gone for either ex battery hens or young birds just about to start laying eggs. The most I’ve ever had is eight birds, they cost 50p each and one of those lived for 5 years which is not bad for a chook.

I currently have 4 birds, my daughter named them a couple of years ago. Malala, Greta Jacinda and Caroline. I have no idea which is which, I called them ‘the damn chickens’ when they used to escape their spacious and luxurious run and start scratching up my newly planted veg patch.

But that was last year, more recently they’ve had to be kept locked in for months due to Avian Flu.

That was a pain but now they’re allowed out in their run again and it’s all lovely. They are very healthy looking and seem quite happy.

These chickens are not pets, although my daughter jokingly gave them names I’m only interested in them because they lay eggs. The amount of eggs varies over the seasons but we are currently getting 4 a day and they are gorgeous, dark yolked eggs and we know what’s gone into them.

Their diet is made up of some mixed corn bird feed, a scoop full of layers pellets, grubs, worms, insects and occasionally, leftover pasta, leftover rice, stale bread and leftover porridge.

So far so good.

Just up the lane from our house are some very tall poplar trees and high in the upper branches is a classic Jackdaw (Coloeus monedula) roost.

I’ll tell you something for starters. These Jackdaws are clever birds, and they love to eat any and all of the following: layers pellets, mixed corn, leftover pasta, leftover rice, bits of stale bread and leftover porridge.

So if I feed the chickens with anything, then walk back down the garden, as soon as I’m out of sight, down they come.

Not one or two Jackdaws. Maybe 15 or 20 of them. The chickens don’t seem that bothered, they just ignore them and carry on scratching about in the grass. But it really annoys me.

Not that I want to shoot Jackdaws, they are clearly amazing birds, it’s more the fact that they are so damn clever. And they eat all the food I put out for the chickens and they turn over the feeder and water trough thing and generally mess everything up.

When I appear in the garden, they seem to know I am coming so I only ever see a flock of birds fly off in different directions. It took me a while to work out that they always have a couple of look outs on the high trees in our garden.

So I started to crawl out of the house so they couldn’t see me, go around the end of my office on all fours and then run up the garden as fast as a stiff old 67 year old can move, arms waving madly just to watch them flee in a dark cloud of panicked flying.

It seemed there was nothing I could do to stop them, these Jackdaws are persistent and fast and clever and determined, so I devised a scarecrow a few years ago.

I say scarecrow, it was a fairly tragic effort. A stick hammered into the earth, a jacket I used to wear on Scrapheap Challenge, a plastic mold of my head used to make the Kryten mask for Red Dwarf, and a hat given to me by JLR when they launched the Jaguar i-Pace.

But here’s the thing, for a while, it worked. I didn’t see Jackdaws for days. I could feed the chickens without anxiety.

Until one day when I arrived back at the house and saw a Jackdaw happily sitting on my head, while 15 of it’s cousins were chomping their way through the chicken food.

So I finally moved the hen house so I could see it more easily, and now I feed the chickens 3 times a day, inside their house, with small amounts of food. I no longer use the feeders and I truly think the Jackdaws have lost interest. I haven’t seen any around the henhouse for many days.

Pigeons on the other hand . . . . D’Oh