Spring is almost here. I could wax about flowers (and hayfever), about politics (and political fatigue) about having to wear my knee rug as a toga for late night meetings because my heater doesn\u2019t do the job. Or I could talk about magpies.<\/p>\n
Australian magpies are scary-bright. If you feed them, they will take care of you. They will watch over you and they will attack intruders in spring. If you don\u2019t, one in ten (or may one in a hundred, maybe fewer) will simply attack. An ornithologist told me once that it\u2019s probably a male testosterone thing. Whether it is that or not, they\u2019re always protecting their turf.<\/p>\n
Attacks are not random. People are attacked strategically. If your face is a known face (if you provide minced meat to the magpie every day of your shred life), you\u2019re safe. If you\u2019re a cyclist, you\u2019re not so safe. If you’re in a pram, you\u2019re not so safe.<\/p>\n
By \u2018not so safe\u2019, eyes have been taken out, on occasion, and there can be contusions and\u2026 you don\u2019t leave a baby alone in the park in magpie season and have a conversation 30 metres away unless you\u2019re certain there is no swooping.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s only for a few weeks a year, and it\u2019s only one out of a great number of birds, so any American who puts magpie attacks on the list of reasons to avoid Australia is helping us avoid people who don\u2019t understand the real dangers to tourists in Australia. Dehydration, for example, is more likely than being successfully attacked by a magpie. If you\u2019re after birds that defeated an army, you should look up \u201cEmu War\u201d, not \u201cattack magpie\u201d.<\/p>\n
Why have I meandered to \u201cAustralia as a dangerous place?\u201d I wanted to talked about the intelligence of magpies, not about Australia\u2019s secret plot to scare away US tourists.<\/p>\n
This year we have two new signs of magpie intelligence. First, they were traumatised by the fire and there are more swoops this year and the swoops started earlier. Magpies get PTSD.<\/p>\n
Second, if you\u2019re wearing a mask, it doesn\u2019t matter if you\u2019ve fed a magpie for twenty years, you\u2019re likely to be swooped. This made me think about the one year in my life I\u2019ve been swooped: I\u2019d changed my hair style and my glasses. Magpies employ facial recognition.<\/p>\n
Also, their song is more complex than most birds, and it changes in different ways to different circumstances, but that\u2019s not new. It is, however, extraordinarily beautiful. Magpies are one of the great song birds. Like opera singers with rapiers, really.<\/p>\n
\u2018Bird-brain\u2019 means something else entirely with Australian magpies to any other bird I know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spring is almost here. I could wax about flowers (and hayfever), about politics (and political fatigue) about having to wear my knee rug as a toga for late night meetings because my heater doesn\u2019t do the job. Or I could talk about magpies. Australian magpies are scary-bright. If you feed them, they will take care […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,16,48],"tags":[112,115,114,113,111],"class_list":["post-527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animals-pets","category-essays","category-nature","tag-australia","tag-birds","tag-emu-war","tag-gilian-polack","tag-magpie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":528,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions\/528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}