Birds
Eurasian Magpie
Pica pica · also called common magpie, European magpie
The Eurasian magpie is impossible to mistake — pied plumage, a long trailing tail, a harsh chattering call, and a swaggering confidence around people. Behind the familiar bird is one of the sharpest minds in the animal kingdom, and centuries of folklore that never quite knew what to make of it.
Overview
Pica pica ranges across Europe, temperate Asia, and northwest Africa, in farmland, hedgerows, parks, and towns. It is 44–46 cm long, half of that the graduated tail, black and white with a blue-green iridescence on the wings and tail. It eats almost anything and caches surplus food.
A mind like an ape’s
Relative to its body, the magpie’s brain rivals a great ape’s. It plans, uses tools in captivity, learns socially, and remembers which individual bird watched it hide food. In a 2008 study it became the first non-mammal to pass the mirror mark test for self-recognition, quietly overturning the assumption that the ability needs a mammalian brain.
Luck, theft, and funerals
Folklore ties the magpie to sorrow and prophecy — “one for sorrow, two for joy” — and to stealing shiny things, the premise of Rossini’s opera. A 2014 experiment found magpies are actually wary of shiny objects. They also gather and call around dead magpies, a behaviour nicknamed a “funeral.”
Status
The magpie is Least Concern and stable to increasing, thriving in suburbia. The unrelated Australian magpie is a butcherbird that merely shares the name.
Eurasian Magpie: common questions
How intelligent is a magpie?
Among the most intelligent of all birds, and by some measures among the most intelligent animals. Magpies are corvids, the family that includes crows, ravens, and jays, and they share that group's large forebrain and flexible problem-solving. They can plan ahead, use and even shape simple tools in captivity, learn by watching others, and keep track of social information such as which specific bird saw them cache food, returning later to move it if they were watched by a potential thief. The 2008 mirror-mark study added self-recognition to that list, a capacity previously demonstrated only in great apes, dolphins, and elephants.
What does the mirror test show and why does it matter?
A bird is marked with a coloured spot in a place it cannot see directly, such as under the chin, and then given a mirror. If it uses the reflection to notice the mark and then touches or tries to remove the mark on its own body, it is taken as evidence that the animal understands the reflection represents itself rather than another individual. Magpies did this; birds with a black mark that was invisible against their plumage did not react. It matters because self-recognition had been assumed to require a large mammalian brain with a neocortex, which birds lack, so the result showed that comparable cognition can be built on a very different brain.
Where does the "one for sorrow" rhyme come from?
Magpies have carried an unsettling reputation in European folklore for centuries, associated variously with bad luck, death, and the devil, probably a mix of their black-and-white colouring, their loud rattling call, and their habit of eating carrion and raiding nests. The counting rhyme, which begins "one for sorrow, two for joy," dates in recorded form to at least the late eighteenth century and exists in many regional versions. The related custom of greeting or saluting a single magpie is meant to ward off the sorrow that a lone bird is said to bring.
Do magpies really steal jewellery?
The belief is very old and became fixed in culture through Rossini's 1817 opera The Thieving Magpie, in which a servant is nearly executed for a theft the bird committed. Researchers at the University of Exeter tested it in 2014 by offering wild and captive magpies piles of shiny and dull objects near food. The birds showed no attraction to the shiny items and were often visibly nervous of them, picking them up only rarely and briefly. Magpies are curious and will investigate novel objects, but the specific idea of a hoard of stolen silver is not supported.