Australian magpie

Name and taxonomy

John Latham gave the bird its first scientific description in 1801. He called it Coracias tibicen, from a specimen taken near Port Jackson. The Latin word tibicen means a piper, and it points to the melodious call. George Robert Gray set up the genus Gymnorhina in 1840. That name joins two Greek words for bare and nostrils, because the nostrils are uncovered. Some later authors moved the bird into the butcherbird genus Cracticus instead.

Colonists used many names for it, including piping crow-shrike, organ-bird and flute-bird. Aboriginal names run to dozens across the continent. The Eora and Darug of the Sydney Basin said marriyang and wibung. Noongar people of the southwest say koorlbardi, and Yindjibarndi people say warndurla. For most of the last century the bird was split into three species. Julian Ford merged them again in 1969, because the forms interbreed freely where they meet.

Evolution and relatives

The Australian magpie belongs to the family Artamidae, with the woodswallows, butcherbirds and currawongs. The Eurasian magpie sits in a different family, the crows and jays. The two are only distant cousins within the wider crow lineage. A genetic study in 2013 found the black butcherbird to be the closest living relative. Their common ancestor left the butcherbird line between 8.3 and 4.2 million years ago. They then parted from each other during the Pliocene.

Nine subspecies are recognised, and they blend into each other in wide zones of overlap. Four are black-backed, four are white-backed, and one lives in New Guinea. Birds tend to grow larger towards the south, although the Tasmanian form is small. The New Guinea birds are closest to the western Australian races. That pattern suggests a savanna land bridge that the sea covered about 16,500 years ago.

Appearance

The magpie is a sturdy bird with a heavy, wedge-shaped bill. The bill is bluish-white with a black border and a small hook at the tip. The head, wings and underparts are glossy black, and the shoulders are white. The tail ends in a black band. An adult measures 37 to 43 cm long, with a wingspan of 65 to 85 cm. The weight runs from 220 to 350 grams.

The saddle below the nape separates the subspecies. Black-backed birds carry a black saddle, and white-backed birds are white from nape to rump. A male has a clean white nape, while a female shows grey there. Adults have dull red or chestnut eyes, which sets them apart from ravens and currawongs. Young birds are duller, with greys and browns in place of the sharp black and white. Their eyes stay dark brown until about the age of two.

Habitat and range

The magpie lives across nearly all of Australia. It is missing only from the Cape York tip, the Gibson and Great Sandy Deserts, and southwest Tasmania. It also holds the Trans-Fly country of southern New Guinea. The bird wants open ground with trees nearby, and nothing more. Grassland, farmland, parks, gardens, golf courses and street verges all suit it. It nests and shelters in the trees but hunts on the open ground below.

It avoids the densest forest and the driest desert. Rainforest and wet forest hold magpies only at the edges of cleared land. Land clearing has therefore helped the species, and its range has grown. Local falls have happened, such as a Queensland drought in 1902 and a Tasmanian decline in the 1930s. Settlers took over 1,000 birds to New Zealand between 1864 and 1874. GBIF holds occurrence records from 17 countries.

Diet and feeding

The magpie is an omnivore, and invertebrates make up most of what it eats. Earthworms, millipedes, snails, spiders and scorpions are all taken. So are beetles, ants, earwigs, cockroaches, cicadas, moths and caterpillars. It also eats skinks, frogs, mice, small birds and carrion. Grain, tubers, figs and walnuts round out the diet. Some birds snatch large grasshoppers out of the air.

The bird works over open ground at a steady walk, probing the soil with its bill. It turns over leaves and debris to reach what hides underneath. One study found that magpies locate scarab grubs by sound or by vibration alone. Small prey goes down whole. The bird rubs the stings off bees, wasps and stinging ants first. It also strips the irritating hairs from a caterpillar before swallowing it. Some magpies have learned to flip a poisonous cane toad and eat only its belly.

Behaviour and social life

The magpie is active by day, though it may call after dark. It walks rather than hops, and it is the only member of its family to do so. A short thigh bone and a long lower leg suit a walking bird. It can still run in short bursts after prey. Groups hold a territory all year, and some groups keep the same ground for many years. A group may hold up to 24 birds.

Much of a magpie's effort goes into keeping other magpies out. In a negotiating display, one or two leaders parade along the boundary while the rest watch. When two groups match in numbers, every bird lines up along the border. Defenders may also swoop and dive in the air while calling. A sentinel that spots a hawk calls the group to mob it. The birds take positions on both sides of the raptor and drive it far past the border.

Aggressive displays outnumber friendly ones. A submissive bird crouches low, begs quietly, or flutters the long feathers of its wing. Young birds play with sticks, stones and scraps of wire, and hand them to each other. One bird flies off with a leaf while the others chase and grab at its tail. A 2022 study watched magpies pull tracking harnesses off one another. That was the first record of birds rescuing each other from a research device.

Communication and senses

The magpie ranks among the finest songbirds in Australia. Its pitch can range over four octaves. It copies more than 35 species of bird, along with dogs and horses. Birds near houses have learned to copy human speech. During the bushfires of 2019 and 2020, magpies copied the sirens of emergency vehicles.

A bird alone sings a quiet warble pitched between 2 and 4 kilohertz. This subsong carries only a short way, and one recording ran for 70 minutes. Carolling is the loud duet that advertises a territory. One bird starts, and one or more answer. Carollers tip the head back, puff the chest and swing the wings behind them. A group carols a short version before dawn and again after sundown in winter and spring.

A hungry fledgling begs with a loud call of about 80 decibels. Alarm calls sit high, between 8 and 10 kHz, and rally the group. The birds use separate alarms for an eagle and for a monitor lizard. A magpie may also clap its beak to warn another species away. Research shows the birds learn to recognise at least 100 individual people by sight.

Reproduction and life cycle

The breeding season runs from June to September in the north. In cooler country it starts in August or September and can last into January. The female alone builds the nest, a bowl of sticks lined with grass and bark. Near towns she works wire and other synthetic material into it. She sets the nest high in a tree fork, often in plain view. Eucalypts are the usual choice, but pines, elms and hawthorns serve as well.

A clutch holds two to five pale blue or green eggs. Each egg is oval and about 30 by 40 millimetres. The chicks hatch together about 20 days after incubation starts. They come out pink, blind and naked, with big feet and a bright red throat. Their eyes open at about 10 days, and down appears in the first week. The female does nearly all the feeding, though her mate feeds her and sometimes the young. In larger groups, helper birds feed the chicks as well.

A fledgling starts to find its own food three weeks after it leaves the nest. Most feed themselves by six months, though some beg on into their ninth month. A bird reaches adult size within its first year. Most first breed at three to five years of age. Dispersal ranges from eight months to four years, and males leave earlier. Magpies usually live to about 25 years, and the oldest recorded birds reached 30.

Predators and threats

Snakes, monitor lizards and the barking owl all kill magpies. The Australian raven takes nestlings from a nest left unguarded. The channel-billed cuckoo lays in magpie nests in eastern Australia. Magpies raise the cuckoo chick, which then outgrows and starves their own young. Adults probably lose few birds to natural predators, given how boldly they mob intruders.

People kill far more magpies than any predator does. Cars strike the birds on roads, and powerlines electrocute them. Poison bait works its way up the food chain. A magpie that eats a poisoned sparrow, mouse, rat or rabbit dies with it. None of this threatens the species, which is common across its whole range.

Population and conservation

The IUCN Red List places the Australian magpie in Least Concern. No one has counted the population, and the bird appears common everywhere it lives. Clearing for farms and towns has widened the range rather than narrowed it. iNaturalist holds 65,431 observations of the species. The magpie is a protected native bird in Australia, so killing one is against the law.

New Zealand tells a different story. The Wellington Acclimatisation Society released 260 birds there in 1874. The birds were meant to control farm pests and were protected until 1951. New Zealand now treats the magpie as a pest that displaces native birds. Waikato University work casts doubt on the charge that magpies raid tui and kereru nests. The species also took hold on Taveuni in Fiji, where nobody calls it invasive.

Relationship with humans

Magpies live comfortably in Australian towns and cities. Many households feed them, and the birds come back to the same door. Some will walk into a house to beg. For most of the year the birds ignore people entirely. Then the eggs hatch, and a small number of males turn on anyone who comes near.

Fewer than 9% of magpies swoop at all, and about 99% of the swoopers are male. A bird starts with alarm calls and distant passes. It then swoops in from behind, snaps its beak, and may peck at a face or ear. Attacks build as the chicks grow and stop once they leave the nest. Most swoopers target either walkers or cyclists, and few bother with both. A bird guards about 50 metres of ground against a walker and 100 m against a cyclist.

Wounds to the head are the usual injury. A cyclist who is swooped may lose control and crash, and some crashes have killed. A wide-brimmed hat or an umbrella helps, but a bike helmet does little. Watching the bird deters it, so people paint eyes on a hat or wear sunglasses backwards. Moving a bird rarely works, since almost all find their way home from under 25 kilometres.

In culture and myth

The magpie appears in Aboriginal stories across the continent. The Yindjibarndi of the Pilbara treated its call as the signal for sunrise. They knew the bird as fiercely territorial, and it appears in a song of their Burndud. Around Illawarra, south of Sydney, people held the magpie as a totem bird. Names for it survive in dozens of Aboriginal languages, from kurraka in Kaurna to guluu in Kamilaroi.

South Australia made the white-backed magpie its emblem under the old name piping shrike. Governor Tennyson proclaimed it in 1901, and it has stood on the state flag since 1904. The painted bird spreads its wings on a rising sun that stands for Federation. Sporting clubs adopted the magpie for its bold and cocky manner. Collingwood took the emblem in 1892 and Port Adelaide in 1902. The Hawke's Bay rugby team in New Zealand carries the name too.

Denis Glover put the call into New Zealand poetry as quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle. Pamela Allen wrote it as waddle giggle gargle paddle poodle in a children's book. Magpie characters appear in Blinky Bill, in Colin Thiele's Magpie Island and in Penguin Bloom. A sculpture called Big Swoop went up in central Canberra in 2022. The magpie won the first Australian Bird of the Year poll in 2017 with 19,926 votes.