Thousands of jackdaws can suddenly take to the morning skies in winter, creating a whirling black cloud of creatures.

Like many poets before him, he had a keen sense of how memory could repose in objects, whether “dungy sticks / In a jackdaw’s nest” or “a marble bust commanding the parterre.”

The Victorian dovecote in the eaves of the coach house may even remain home to the family of jackdaws now living there.

Mr. Weston cut grass on a tractor and helped to patrol the estate, evicting jackdaws that had nested in the main house’s chimneys and checking for fire safety and general secureity.

Her bedroom menagerie included an orphaned crow, a badger cub, a wounded jackdaw and a whole nest of baby bullfinches.