Egging on the magpies…

Not just black and white - a beady-eyed magpie among the ash trees...

OK, I know it’s a bit controversial, since they snatch the eggs of smaller birds, but I really do like magpies. Some things just aren’t all black and white, you might say.

They are beautiful, big and comparatively easy to photograph, surprisingly colourful and very entertaining.

Until about six weeks ago, I used to throw away the skin of scrambled egg that sticks to the surface of my “non-stick” pan. But now I have found it is one of the magpies’ favourites!

Cold water loosens the egg, which I then scrape off with my fingernails and place in a pile, where I can see it from the kitchen window.

Usually the magpies are there within a minute or two to wolf it down, but of course the day I decided to have my camera ready I had to wait 10 minutes. And then a couple of the magpies came, had a bit of a fight and the egg was all gone in no time at all. And I had only fired off about five shots with my camera.

A magpie trying to eat all the scrambled egg in one go...

Magpie wolfing down some more scrambled egg...

Nearly all gone...

Magpies are reputed to be very clever birds and certainly they have shown many skills with their food lately. They fill their beaks with dried mealworms from the bird table and dunk them in the birdbath before fishing them out again to eat. Mmmm, juicy!

A magpie with a beak full of raisins and dried mealworms from the bird table - a bit blurred but note the lovely rainbow-black feathers...

I also spotted one the other day with a fat pellet, burying it under the gravel and piling on pebbles to make sure it was good and covered.

I was particularly pleased with this shot of a magpie taking off (unexpectedly), captured in March last year...

For the record, the British magpie species has the Latin name Pica pica, simply a repetition of the name the Romans themselves used for the bird, with which they were clearly very familiar. The magpie is very ancient, 17-million-year-old fossils of an ancestral version, Miopica, having been found in the Ukraine.

One thing I didn’t realise is that pica also means “a craving for unsuitable food” (thank you to my old Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary)…

I did already know, from my hot-metal days in newspapers, that pica is a type-size of 12 points (a sixth of an inch). But I didn’t know where it came from. The dictionary says it comes from its use in printing the pie, and here’s the definition of that:

pie, pye, noun, a book of rules for determining the Church office for the day. —by cock and pie (Shakespeare), a minced oath, apparently from “by God and the pie” (from the Late Latin pica, possibly the same as Latin pica, magpie, from the black and white appearance of the page).

The English name for the magpie has two elements. The second part, pie , in this context means a mixture, as in the pie we eat or “printer’s pie”, a jumble of metal type. The word pied originally meant a mixture of colours and only later narrowed to mean just black and white.

But from all the above I’m starting to think which word came first, the “pie” or the pica?

Meanwhile the first part of the name, “mag”, is a shortened form of Margaret and in the late 18th century a “mag” or “meg” was someone who chattered a lot. The magpie itself is also called a chatterpie or chatternag in some areas.

Here’s the RSPB page for the magpie, on which you can listen to its loud, distinctive rattling call.

The magpie is a member of the big Corvid family, which includes crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, magpies, treepies, choughs and nutcrackers. So many of them appear to be clever birds and some have been domesticated. I would love to have a pet magpie!

Corvid cousins - magpie, top, and carrion crow (Corvus corone), to compare the size - the crow is too big to land on the bird table...

A person referred to as a “magpie” is a hoarder or collector, although magpies are often thought of more as thieves than collectors, notably in the little opera La Gazza Ladra by Gioachino Rossini. In this a servant girl, Ninetta, is accused of stealing a silver spoon that is eventually found in a magpie’s nest, just in time to save her from execution. Sorry to give away the ending!

Thieving magpie by Maudeux on Deviant Art - click on the image to see more...

And finally…
There was a children’s teatime TV programme in Britain in the 1970s called Magpie. As its theme tune it used this sanitised version of an old nursery rhyme that associates luck (good and bad) with the number of magpies you see…

One for sorrow
Two for joy
Three for a girl
Four for a boy
Five for silver
Six for gold
Seven for a secret never to be told
Eight’s a wish and
Nine a kiss
Ten is a bird you must not miss…

Here’s one version of the original rhyme:
One for sorrow,
Two for luck (or mirth),
Three for a wedding,
Four for death (or birth),
Five for silver,
Six for gold;
Seven for a secret,
Not to be told;
Eight for Heaven,
Nine for Hell
And ten for the devil’s own sel’

I know many people who, when seeing a single magpie, feel they have to say “Hello Mr Magpie, where’s your lady friend?” to avoid ill fortune. I used to do it myself.

Magpies may be considered a bird of bad omen, and noisy bullies, but I love them and I will keep egging them on…

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