49 Choucas de tour...

& synchronous events

Zhou Wenjing-Ancient Tree and Jackdaws; Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), 15th century (public domain)

Interesting how you put something out there, and there is a response. Not a human one, what’s more. So in my last Middles of Nowhere post, 27th April, I wrote about my fury that it’s always open season on jackdaws. Yes, I have a personal attachment to them. Yes, they’re mostly but not entirely innocents. But they’re not (quite) as predatory as magpies, don’t peck lambs’ eyes out like ravens, are not as aggressive as some crows. And like the other corvids, they are extremely bright.

I have a soft spot for all these corvids, but the blue-eyed ones in particular. When I was a child Crackpot, a jackdaw with a broken wing, lived with us for a while. Later, when I lived at the National Trust’s Buckland Abbey (one-time Cistercian monastery, then home of Francis Drake and Richard Grenville), from my bedroom window I loved watching how the doves and the jackdaws perched together, the black and the white livery, on the roof of the C13th tithe barn – it seemed symbolic.

In Cornwall the chough, similar to a jackdaw but with red beak and legs, is the national bird: in serious decline until recently. If I wanted to be symbolic there too, I could say that it’s interesting that they are coming back now that the Cornish have been recognised as a minority nation (2014). I have lots to say about both birds mythologically, but not here (I have an essay on this elsewhere).

In Finistère, I have come across jackdaws particularly at harvest time in the local villages, scrabbling over the barley and wheat gleanings spilt in the roads, alongside the collared doves, wood pigeons and an occasional rook.

But although I see the odd pair flying over, they don’t hang out on our land. Or I should say now ‘didn’t’. The day after I wrote what I did, suddenly a flock – a ‘chack’ – of about 20 jackdaws appeared. Now, there are about 80. They alight in the trees, and fly over and past a lot, with their inimitable chacking voices.

We live in an interconnected universe. ‘Somewhere a butterfly stamps, and suddenly everything’s changed’ – whether or not we see it. The smallest actions have consequences. How would it be to live as if we really believed that?

Of course, it’s easy to say that it’s all coincidence: that after all would be the Cartesian and rationalist view (although quantum mechanics has challenged that, a little). But this web in which we all live: everything is intimately and ultimately inextricably entwined. Who knows what is causal, what is effect, what is synchronous?

But I pay attention. I wrote about it, and the jackdaws appeared. A current in my psyche met a ripple in the wider psyche, the anima mundi, in which we all live (Jung once said, famously, that ‘soul’ doesn’t live in us; rather, we live in soul). The two currents flowed together until Lo! the jackdaws appeared. Unless, of course, they read, and read English…


Thank you for reading. (Likes, comments and shares make me very happy! – or at least they do my ego some good.) I wish you all a joyful, creative and attentive May.