magpies

Magpies have been maligned, it seems.  Far from being natural thieves, they avoid shiny objects, according to an animal scientist interviewed on this morning's Today programme.  She was originally investigating their behaviour foraging for food, before venturing off-piste into the question of whether or not they take shiny things to adorn their nests.  When she put a pile of shiny objects near the food, and a pile of similar shaped objects painted matt blue, the magpies not only didn't take them or touch them very much, they spent less time feeding.  She was keen to stress the limitations of her study, that she was studying paired-off adult magpies, and that juveniles below breeding age might behave differently, but she concluded that folk lore had given magpies a bad press, and that maybe people had noticed and remembered the odd incident with shiny things and ignored all the much more numerous instances in which magpies ignored them.

Ah, the difficulties of science.  Corvids are extremely intelligent birds, and even quite dim animals in my experience can be very suspicious of changes to their routine, or anything that looks like a set-up.  So I would be a little cautious about drawing too many conclusions if she were using the same magpies and started introducing arbitrary piles of shiny things or matt blue things or anything else, once they had got used to the feeding routine.  And I wouldn't be at all surprised if magpies avoided blue things, because food is not generally blue.  Hence rat bait and slug pellets are both often coloured blue to try and discourage birds from eating them, and blue icing has never caught on.  But it was only a quick Today feature, and didn't give the methodology in full.

I am convinced that something picks up shiny things and carries them around before dropping them, though, because I keep finding small pieces of glass in the garden.  This is the first house to have been built on the site, so far as I know, and we have lived here for over twenty years, during which time we have thrown a few decorous parties but never been in the habit of smashing drinks glasses around the garden, or randomly leaving them in the flower beds.  I can just about believe that one or two pieces of domestic glassware got dropped outside on our watch, and maybe a few more under the regime of the previous owners, but I'm struggling to believe that all that broken glass was generated in situ.  I have never found a whole glass, or most of the pieces of one, just  fragments. And the drinks in the garden hypothesis absolutely does not account for the flat rectangle about one inch by two of something that looked like picture or window glass which I picked up in the wood, unscratched and with edges still sharp.  It was fresh out of somebody's workshop.

Something picks them up and then drops them.  Magpies?  Whirlwinds like the ones that account for showers of fish?  Although if it is the proverbial thieving magpies then why is it never a diamond ring, or a silver teaspoon, but always broken glass?