As Jen and I trudged uphill at the end of a blustery post-storm walk the other week, I spotted a jackdaw do something pretty odd. It was gliding at speed towards us, banking as close to the wind as possible, not unlike a surfer trimming along the face of a wave. This bird was clearly in its element. Then…
Wipe out! The jackdaw—deliberately, it looked to me—suddenly cut way too close to the wind, spinning sideways, then backwards, coming to an instantaneous mid-air stop. At the risk of mixing my sporting similes, it looked as if it had performed the corvine equivalent of an [ice] hockey stop, or a skier’s powder-spray parallel stop*. It had used the medium it was travelling through to stop on a sixpence.
Having lost all its air-speed, the jackdaw dropped like a stone, but immediately twisted about into a new glide, and repeated the handbrake turn, its feathers billowing out like a parachute. Again, it plummeted, immediately recovered, and repeated the same manoeuvre. Then it tumbled into another glide and headed off downwind. In all, the triple manoeuvre must have lasted all of three seconds.
Have you ever watched an animal and been convinced you knew exactly what was going on in its head? Well, I was immediately pretty damn sure I knew what that jackdaw had been up to, and, as I have form for sharing my bat-shit crazy hypotheses about members of the crow family, I see no good reason for not sharing this one…
I think that jackdaw was very deliberately getting the strong wind to blow through its feathers the wrong way in an attempt to dislodge any dirt and parasites lodged deep within them. I appreciate this sounds fanciful, but birds sun-bathe, dust-bathe, and bathe in water—or, to put it more poetically, use fire, earth and water—to rid themselves of parasites; it seems only appropriate they should also use the other classical element, air, to pull off the same trick. Wind-bathing, so to speak.
So, there you have it: another bat-shit crazy hypothesis about crows. Like last time, I’m putting out there in the interest of science communication. If this one also fails to land me a Nobel Prize, there really is no justice in this world.
* With thanks to my winter-sportsy sister-in-law, Mòmö, for the winter-sportsy terminology.
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