02/21/2013 | magpies

About twenty years ago, sorting through editorial mail, I shook out a piece of cardboard from the envelope, on which, apparently, an engraving was pasted

On the back of the cardboard there were two words - "Give it to Peskov." I thought that this is too modest artist decided to draw attention to himself. Thought the artist would show up. So in my papers there was a drawing and lay for twenty years. Several times "magpies" caught my eye. I admired them, remembering my childhood - near our hut, these beautiful birds in winter on a frosty day sat on willow branches with white balls.

And one day my father beckoned me with his finger: “Look ...” Through the cracks in the barn, I saw two magpies hanging on the carcass of a slaughtered kid. But the father did not swear, he simply drove away forty, and they sat down, as before, on a large tree: “God's creature. Where can she get food in winter ... "Father cut off a piece of goat meat and put it on the stones, near the barn:" This is for the birds ... "

While in America, I learned that forty is not known in this country. Famous travelers Lewis and Clark were delighted to meet with an interesting and beautiful bird in the very north of the country. And with a messenger they sent an expensive gift to the President. And in Norway, the magpie is considered a sacred bird. And it's noticeable. In a hotel in Oslo, magpies sat by my window.

As I should, I learned the habits of magpies while in the Khopersky Reserve. I lived in the summer in an empty school. I woke up, I remember, from some rustle. I see a magpie working at the window, extracting seeds from an open watermelon. I cut off a piece with seeds and began to observe.

Three days later, I heard a commotion. A neighbor in the neighboring yard was screaming and pointing at someone else. It turned out that the magpie grabbed a downy chicken, but the burden was beyond its strength. Another time I was sitting in a boat, covered with a tarpaulin - it was raining lightly. I look through the gap and see: right next to the boat moored to the shore, a magpie, leaning against it, drags a young snake. The snake does not want to fall into the water. But the magpie turned out to be stronger, contrived to peck the victim twice. Here the snake is already dangling over the water in the beak of a magpie.

On the same day, I told about the case to an experienced observer Vasily Alexandrovich Anokhin. "It common case. I knew a couple of magpies who hunted mice. The bird sits at the mink and waits for the minute it needs. And you see how the magpie flew with a mouse in its beak ... "

Magpies can be credited with their nest building. Magpie nests are built in pairs and are very strong. At the base of the nest is a large clay ball and a ball of thin branches. It would seem that the nest should serve for several years - forty is a sedentary bird. No, every year in March you can watch magpies lek over the field. After the wedding current, the construction of the dwelling begins. It serves magpies until autumn. And by winter, lodgers appear - owls and falcons. Just as woodpeckers involuntarily prepare housing for hollow-nesting birds, so do magpies “give” their home.

But in the summer they protect the new nest from any encroachment. Once I decided to check the reliability of the building and looked into the nest where the chicks were. The magpie jumped out of the nest instantly, but immediately returned and sat on a twig nearby. "Might knock off my cap." But the matter ended in a furious swotting of the bough on which the bird was sitting. This is the name of the action - "substitution reaction".

On a winter day...

And once again in the autumn I found in the nest a small ladies' watch "Dawn" on a thin cord. The watch was stained with bird droppings, the metal on the watch turned green - it is clear that women's jewelry had lain in the magpie's nest for more than one year. And it was an important street of magpie theft.

But why forty hours? That a magpie is a thief has long been known. Such a thieving crow. (That's not why the name of the bird: vor-she.) I had to see how ravens steal eggs in the nests of cormorants. One begins to tease, bully the bird sitting on the nest, and as soon as it rises to stand up for itself, the other crow grabs the egg.

But all this, as they say, is in the order of things. Much more interesting are the criminal facts about the abductions by birds of valuable and not very valuable, but shiny or colored little things. Here are the documents of my long-term investigation.

In the Berdyansk rest house "Primorye" suddenly began to disappear wrist watch. The local Sherlock Holmes shrugged their shoulders in dismay - a mystery! Solved the riddle Nina Belovdenko. Early in the morning, opening her eyes, she saw a magpie walking on the windowsill. “I look: lope, I grabbed a watch from a neighbor’s bedside table and immediately onto a poplar ...” Five watches, a ring, fifty dollars, a light belt with a buckle and half a dozen metal bottle caps were found in the nest on the poplar.

Ravens steal in much the same way. And you can talk for a long time about stolen teaspoons, glasses, watches, razor blades, fishing lures, coins, keys and other temptations for jackdaws, crows, magpies, jays. But how to explain this strangeness - to take possession of a brilliant object? After all, glass pieces of iron for birds have no practical use.

In one of the recently published books on animal behavior, I came across the term "pre-aesthetic impulse", which should be understood as the germ of a sense of beauty in animals. This thought appears to be correct. Tufts, crests, bright feathers in the wings, red breasts, rainbow tails in the colorful world of birds do not exist at all to please a person. Paints and sparkles are designed for the bird's eye, for the eyes of a feathered friend. She must appreciate this beauty. And, therefore, she must feel it! Is it not this "pre-aesthetic impulse" that makes our corvids encroach on everything that glitters and stands out in color?

This reflection is confirmed by the behavior of the Australian bowerbird. A modestly dressed male of this bird carefully decorates the place for the marriage meeting. Having built a love hut, he brings shells, shiny beetle wings, flowers to it, lays out the leaves of plants with a silvery underside up.

Studying the aesthetic taste of bowerbirds, ornithologists scattered all sorts of things in their habitat in abundance - choose! What color attracts bowerbirds more than others? Turned out to be blue. Why? So far, the answer seems to be no.

That's all. It remains to thank the unknown artist for the masterful representation of wonderful birds.

The magpie bird (Pica pica) has not the best reputation among the people. It is believed that she is prone to theft (kleptomania), and most of all she is supposedly attracted to shiny objects. And the magpie has such a reputation not only in Russian folklore, but throughout Europe.

So, in Gioacchino Rossini's opera The Thieving Magpie, a servant girl was accused of stealing her master's silver, which was actually stolen by a magpie. In the popular European comic The Adventures of Tintin, a similar story takes place in which a magpie turns out to be an emerald thief. Well, in Russian fairy tales, rhymes, nursery rhymes, the magpie-thief is a constant heroine.

Scientists decided to check whether the magpie is a thief and why she loves shiny things.

Animal behavior experts at the University of Exeter (UK) set up special experiments, which resulted in a complete rehabilitation of the magpie.

She doesn’t steal rings and silver spoons from the windowsill, don’t hang everything that doesn’t lie on her!

A group of ornithologists led by Tony Stephard set up a series of experiments with magpies, which involved both birds from the nursery and wild specimens living on campus. In a laboratory room or in several places on a university campus that are frequented by magpies, biologists have laid out various objects, shiny and non-shiny.

Items included shiny metal bolts and screws, foil rings, and square pieces of aluminum foil. In half the cases, these objects were painted with matte blue paint, the rest shone in the sun. Nearby objects that are attractive to the human eye, the experimenters laid out piles of food (nuts).

With wild magpies, biologists conducted 64 tests, and

only in two of them did the birds become interested in the proposed objects, and both times they turned them over with their beaks and immediately threw them away. In the rest of the tests, objects were simply ignored, and there was no difference between shiny and blue.

Nuts attracted them much more.

In tests with magpies from the nursery, none of the birds began to contact objects - neither shiny nor non-shiny.

From observations, scientists concluded that the proposed objects caused fear in magpies, like any unfamiliar objects, and did not attract them at all.

“We found no evidence that magpies are attracted to shiny objects. Instead, we noted neophobia: a common animal fear of novelty,” says Tony Stephard.

Where did the myth come from that the magpie loves everything that glitters?

According to scientists, we project our own addictions onto forty.

It seems to us that magpies should be attracted to silver and gold objects, so if they are sometimes interested in them, we remember this. At the same time, we do not notice when magpies are interested in more inconspicuous objects, and even more so we do not notice when they ignore them. So the magpie became the heroine of folklore and earned the fame of a thief without any evidence of this.

“Surprisingly, very little research has been done on the behavior and cognition of magpies,” adds Nathalie Hempel de Ibarra, co-author of the paper. “Although, like crows, belonging to the same family, magpies have a large brain and advanced thinking. They recognize themselves in the mirror, find objects disappearing from view and remember when and where they hid food in reserve. In our experiments, magpies also showed that they are smart: instead of rushing at something that glitters, they showed reasonable caution in front of unfamiliar and unpredictable objects.

In one ordinary city with one ordinary crow living on an ordinary street, this unusual story happened. On this day, she managed to get a wonderful piece of chicken, a wing. She was about to enjoy it when another crow flew up to her.

Kar, - said the crow that had flown in, greeting her friend.

Kar, - she answered, trying to close the chicken wing with her body. She didn't want to share it with her friend.

Kar, Kar, - began to report last news flying crow. She said that today all the crows should gather on a large oak tree in the garden. The head raven will tell them something important.

Kar, Kar, our heroine answered. This meant that she would definitely arrive.

At noon, a huge flock of crows gathered on a large oak tree. They were talking among themselves so loudly that their croaking could be heard from afar. Our crow had already finished eating a wing, so it was sitting on a tree full and contented.

Kar, - shouted the head raven. Everyone immediately fell silent, turning their attention to him. He said that there was a complaint from some crows about why crows do not have clothes and jewelry, like people do?

This news was so unexpected for our crow that it almost fell off the tree, but managed to hold on by grabbing the nearest branch with its beak.

Where can we get these clothes? she screamed indignantly.

The message stirred the whole flock of crows. The crows flapped their wings and, turning to each other, expressed their opinion on this matter. Shouts were heard from all sides:

Why is this necessary, we have feathers.
- Indeed, where can we get it?
- We are fine even without clothes.
-What clothes should you wear?
- And who will sew it for us?
- Perhaps, I would leave jewelry.

They argued, argued, until the head raven called again, everyone immediately fell silent.

Kar, Kar. Crows will not wear clothes, they have feathers. You can have jewelry, - the raven expressed his decision.

Satisfied with this decision, the crows scattered into different sides. Since then, crows have been dragging jewelry and anything that glitters into their nests. But some of them still try to put something on themselves to look dressed.

Reviews

So that's why they love jewelry so much! I liked your explanation, Larisa. Just don't take offense at my comment.
It is often mistaken to think that a crow and a raven are just a male and a female. But actually it is not. These are two completely different species of the Corvidae family.
Crows and crows are different birds. Raven - male and female - raven. A crow is a female and a male is a crow.
However, I don't think kids care. Only biologists know this.

The daily audience of the Proza.ru portal is about 100 thousand visitors, who total amount view more than half a million pages according to the traffic counter, which is located to the right of this text. Each column contains two numbers: the number of views and the number of visitors.

Many people believe that magpies steal shiny objects to decorate their nests with. However, this story originates from a 19th century French play. So what is a magpie really like? What about her is a myth, and what is reality?

Reputation and reality

The magpie's reputation is such that these birds are notorious for their theft, as they gather shiny objects around the world to decorate their nests with. They also feed on the eggs and chicks of songbirds, a terrible habit that has led to the extinction of many breeds. However, in reality, magpies are not thieves - they are just inquisitive. They are interested in various objects, but do not actually show an increased interest in shiny objects. It is true that they are predators that prey on songbirds, but there is no evidence that their activities led to the extinction of the species or even to the reduction of the population.

Roots of the legend

Forty is far from the most best reputation. In general, there are many different types these birds, but most attention is paid to the Eurasian magpies. In 1815, two French playwrights wrote the legendary play The Thieving Magpie, in which a servant was sentenced to death for stealing his master's silverware when the real thief was a magpie. Inspired by a French urban legend, Gioacchino Rossini staged an opera called The Magpie, which used the same plot. And then such fame was fixed for magpies. Two hundred years later, scientists made forty the object of experiments, which finally allowed to dispel the myth and clear the name of this bird. They offered a common Eurasian magpie two piles of nuts - one of them lay next to shiny objects, and the other - with the same objects painted in matte blue. The objects visibly distracted the bird from eating, but it was not observed that it preferred shiny objects. In only two of the 64 tests, Magpie took the silver ring, but quickly threw it away. "We can't say that magpies never steal shiny objects," study author Stephen Lee said.

Magpies and shiny objects

“However, we also have no evidence that magpies are more attracted to shiny objects than other birds.” The results of this study complement what ecologist Tim Birkhead found. He studied magpies in natural conditions for ten years and is the author of a book about these birds. Birkhead is absolutely certain that magpies don't steal. “There is no evidence that humans have ever found anything shiny in magpie nests,” he said. However, he reports that magpies are very inquisitive and pick up a wide variety of objects to study them. So in the days when people kept magpies as pets (as was the case with the French play), these birds had a huge number of opportunities to pick up various valuable items. And this may explain the rumors about their kleptomania.

Terror

But is there any truth to the fact that magpies terrorize other bird species? “There is no doubt that they eat the eggs and children of songbirds,” Birkhead said. The magpie is a persistent, noisy and conspicuous predator. So if you've been enjoying seeing a couple of blackbirds happily trying to start a family in your yard, then you might be very upset when a magpie comes in and kills their chicks in your lawn. However, there is no evidence that predation by magpies has caused songbird population declines. In a paper published in 1991, Birkhead described how he and his colleagues studied the population density and breeding success of forty and fifteen songbird species.

Research

Between 1966 and 1986, the number of forty in Britain increased steadily by about five percent a year. However, this did not have any negative impact on the living and breeding of songbirds.
In fact, the largest increase in the songbird population was observed at the same time as the increase in the population of magpies, which indicates that any decline in the population of songbirds was due to poor habitat conditions rather than magpies. A scientific work published later, in 1998, and covering an even longer period of time, contained identical conclusions. Even domestic cats are a greater threat to songbirds than magpies.

Image copyright robin24CC by 2.0 Image caption

The reputation of a magpie is unenviable. The genus forty unites many species, but the European magpie is usually accused of wrecking (the Latin name is pica pica). But is the reputation true? The correspondent decided to figure this out So ...

Myth: Magpies are known for their thieving habits: they are greedy for shiny objects that they use to decorate nests. In addition, magpies eat eggs and defenseless chicks of songbirds, which is why the populations of many birds are declining.

Reality : magpies are not thieves, they are just curious. EThese birds show interest in various objects, but preferences are precisely shiny things don't give back. FROMoroks are really gluttonoushunters of songbirds, but there is no strong evidence that this somehow affects the number of the latter.

In 1815, two French playwrights, Louis Charles Quesnier and Jean Marie Théodore Baudouin d'Aubigny, wrote a historical melodrama called The Thieving Magpie, or The Maid of Palaiseau, in which a maid is sentenced to death on charges of stealing silverware from her master. , while in fact the thief is his home pet- magpie bird.

Subsequently, the Italian composer Gioacchino Rossini used this plot in his opera The Thieving Magpie, or Danger to judge by appearance. And in the eyes of the public, the magpie remained for a long time a bird with thieving habits.

Image copyright Vasiliy Vishnevskiy Alamy Image caption Magpie nest: no shiny objects found

Two hundred years later, researchers subjected forty series of experiments to see if their reputation matches the real state of affairs. They offered wild European magpies two piles of nuts. One of the slides was next to a bunch of shiny screws, rings, and square pieces of aluminum foil. Another hill was located near a pile of the same metal objects, but painted in matte blue.

The presence of foreign objects distracted the birds from feeding on both occasions, but they did not show a markedly higher interest in shiny objects compared to simply colored ones. In only two of the 64 tests, the magpie picked up a shiny ring, but after a short time lost interest in it.

"You can't say that magpies never steal shiny objects," says study author Stephen Lee of the University of Exeter in the UK. "But we have no reliable evidence that shiny things attract magpies more than any other birds."

Image copyright Andrew Parkinson NPL Image caption European magpie (Pica pica) bouncing around

These results are consistent with data obtained by ecologist Tim Burkhead from the University of Sheffield in Britain. For 10 years he studied the behavior of magpies in the Rivelin Valley near Sheffield.

Burkhead is absolutely certain that magpies do not trade in theft: "There is absolutely no evidence that people have ever found shiny objects in magpie nests."

However, according to Burkhead, magpies are very curious and do often pick up various objects. In the past, when magpies were kept as pets, the birds were probably given more than one opportunity to pick up the owner's valuable little thing. This may explain the myth of their kleptomania.

Is it true that magpies ruthlessly destroy other birds? "There is no doubt that they eat the eggs and chicks of songbirds," says Burkhead.

Magpie is a malicious, noisy and annoying predator, he continues. If you have watched with emotion how a pair of thrushes build a nest in your garden, of course, you will be seized with righteous anger at the sight of a magpie tormenting their chicks on your lawn.

Image copyright Beth Moore Alamy Image caption The rabbit is really dead. But the magpies didn't kill him!

But the available data is not enough to argue that the predatory habits of magpies have led to a decline in songbird populations.

In a study published in 1991, Burkhead and colleagues studied population densities and reproductive success of magpies and 15 species of songbirds native to Britain, including the blackbird, tit, songthrush, hawker and robin.

Between 1966 and 1986 the number of magpies in the UK has been steadily increasing - about 5% per year. However, this fact did not have a visible negative impact on the nesting success of any of the studied species of songbirds.

Moreover, the number of songbirds in the wooded area grew at the greatest rate precisely when the peak reached the number of forty in this area. It can be assumed that if the number of songbirds declined, it was not the fault of the magpies, but because of the deterioration of habitat conditions. The same conclusions were reached by the authors of a study published in 1998, which examined the dynamics of songbird populations over an even longer period of time.

Image copyright Stefan Berndtsson CC by 2.0 Image caption "If they were rare birds, people would specially travel many kilometers to look at them"

Much big problem for our garden friends are domestic cats. "The danger of cats to songbirds is undoubtedly very great, but at the same time, all the anger of the average bird lover is directed at forty," notes Burkhead.

Alas, no one understands forty. "If they were rare birds, people would purposely travel many miles to look at them," says Burkhead. "In bright daylight, they look just adorable - with long tails and iridescent play of color on feathers."

But, he says, most of us still tend to see magpies as malevolent creatures: "It's unlikely to convince the public otherwise."