Birds
Magpie
Pica · also called magpies, common magpie
A magpie is a striking pied bird with a long iridescent tail, and the Eurasian one is a serious contender for the title of smartest bird. It uses tools, plans ahead, deceives rivals about where it has hidden food, and in 2008 became the first animal outside the mammals to recognise itself in a mirror. The old story that it steals shiny things, though, appears to be a myth.
Overview
The magpies of the crow family are the genus Pica — the widespread Eurasian magpie and its close North American relatives, the black-billed and yellow-billed magpies. They are omnivores of farmland, hedgerows, parks, and city edges, eating insects, worms, small animals, eggs, carrion, grain, and scraps. Confusingly, the name is also worn by several unrelated black-and-white birds, most notably the Australian magpie, which is a butcherbird.
A great-ape-sized mind
The Eurasian magpie has a brain-to-body ratio like a great ape’s, and it shows tool use, planning, deceptive food-caching, cooperation, and behaviour around dead companions that looks like grief. In a 2008 experiment it passed the mirror mark test, a sign of self-awareness previously found only in apes, elephants, and dolphins.
Folklore
European tradition ties the magpie to luck (“one for sorrow, two for joy”) and to theft — but a controlled study found magpies are actually wary of unfamiliar shiny objects and no more likely to take them than dull ones. The unrelated Australian magpie is famous instead for its carolling song and for the minority of males that swoop cyclists in spring.
Status
Least Concern and often increasing — the Eurasian magpie has adapted superbly to human landscapes. It is sometimes persecuted for taking songbird nests, though long-term studies find little population effect. A few small-range Asian blue magpies are Near Threatened from forest loss.
Magpie: common questions
Are magpies really intelligent?
The Eurasian magpie is one of the most cognitively capable birds studied, on a level with crows and ravens, its close relatives in the crow family. It has a very large forebrain for its size, and experiments credit it with tool use and manufacture, planning ahead, an understanding that hidden objects still exist, deceptive food-caching where it moves a cache if it was watched hiding it, cooperative behaviour, and the mirror self-recognition mentioned above. Magpies also appear to gather around a dead magpie and behave differently for a time afterwards, which some researchers interpret as a rudimentary response to death. Not every claim is settled, but the weight of evidence places magpie intelligence among the highest in the animal kingdom.
Do magpies steal shiny things?
Almost certainly not, despite the strength of the belief, which is old enough to have inspired an opera, Rossini's The Thieving Magpie. A 2014 study at the University of Exeter presented wild and captive magpies with piles of shiny and non-shiny objects near food and found that the birds were, if anything, made nervous by the shiny items and picked them up less often than dull ones, usually just to investigate before dropping them. Magpies are curious and will examine novel objects, and a tame or captive bird may cache small items, but there is no evidence of a special attraction to shiny things or of deliberate hoarding of jewellery and coins.
Why do Australian magpies attack people, and are they the same bird?
They are not the same bird. The Australian magpie is a member of the butcherbird family, Artamidae, and only got the name from early settlers because its black-and-white plumage reminded them of the European magpie. The swooping is done by a minority of male Australian magpies, perhaps around one in ten, and only for a few weeks in spring while they have chicks in the nest, when they perceive passers-by, and especially cyclists, as threats and dive at their heads. Individual magpies often target specific people they have decided are dangerous while leaving others alone. The birds are otherwise valued for their carolling song and their tolerance of humans, and many will accept food and become quite tame.
What is the difference between a magpie and a crow?
In the crow family, magpies and crows are close cousins. The Eurasian magpie is easy to tell from a crow — it is boldly pied black and white, has a very long, wedge-shaped, iridescent green-blue tail that makes up more than half its length, and flies with a distinctive flap-flap-glide. A crow is all black, stocky, and shorter-tailed. Their diets, intelligence, adaptability, and family-group social behaviour are broadly similar. The North American black-billed magpie is almost identical to the Eurasian one, while the Australian magpie, being unrelated, is a separate case that resembles neither closely apart from the colour.