Jac-y-do

I would rather this were a live jackdaw but when it dropped from the sky it was beautiful even in death. The bird was still warm when we found it, with just a fleck of blood on its breast. It's clear here how the powerful beak and sharp claws are perfectly evolved for its predatory diet of small mammals, amphibians and invertebrates of all kinds, although it also scavenges and steals other birds' eggs. The plumage is glossy black except for a silvery shawl.

These are highly intelligent birds that can attach themselves to human beings like the schoolboy recently in the news.

When the ethologist Konrad Lorenz was studying the jackdaws that nested on his house he wondered how to ring the young birds without turning the adults against him. He came up with a solution: to wear a costume that would conceal his identity. The one he had to hand was a devil's costume for a traditional Austrian festival.
"I wonder what you would think if, on a beautiful June day, you suddenly heard from a gable roof of a high house, a wild rattling noise, and, looking up, you saw Satan himself, equipped with horns, tail and claws, his tongue hanging out in the heat, climbing from chimney to chimney, surrounded by a swarm of black birds making ear-splitting rattling cries.

We used to have jackdaws nesting our chimneys and the noise they made was indeed almost deafening in its staccato, metallic, clacking and clinking. Their nest-building technique consists of dropping twigs casually into the chimney pot until a few eventually lodge and then more are piled on top. Meanwhile the rest of the twigs create a fire hazard further down as we once discovered to our cost.

Jac-y-do is the Welsh form of the name jackdaw.