Eurasian magpie

Name and taxonomy

Conrad Gessner described and drew the magpie in his Historiae animalium of 1555. Linnaeus listed it in 1758 as Corvus pica, inside the crow genus. Mathurin Jacques Brisson gave it the genus Pica in 1760. Pica is simply the Latin word the Romans used for this bird. The International Ornithological Congress accepts six subspecies across the range.

English speakers first called the bird a pie, which came through French from pica. The syllable mag arrived in the 16th century, from the name Margaret. People once used that name for women in general, and they likened the bird's chatter to gossip. Shakespeare wrote magot pie in Macbeth in 1606, and a French form appears in 1573. The word pied, first written down in 1552, spread from this bird to every black and white one.

Evolution and relatives

The magpie sits in the Corvidae, beside the crows, ravens and jackdaws. It belongs to a northern group of black and white magpies. The Iberian magpie is the only other magpie that breeds in Europe. The Australian magpie shares the name and the colours but sits in another family. The two birds meet only at the level of a very large clade, the Corvides.

The black-billed magpie of North America looks almost the same as this bird. Ornithologists once treated the two as one species. In 2000 the American Ornithologists' Union split them, on voice and behaviour. The black-billed bird turned out to be closer to the yellow-billed magpie of California. Four former subspecies are now species in their own right, among them the Oriental magpie. DNA work found that birds in eastern China differ from those in Spain and northwest China.

Appearance

Glossy black covers the head, the neck, the breast and the vent, with a green and violet shine. The belly and the shoulder feathers are clean white. The wings are black with a green or purple gloss, and the flight feathers carry white inner webs. That white probably flashes as a signal when the wing beats. The tail is graduated, black, and shot with green and reddish purple. The tail alone measures 12 to 28 centimetres.

The bill and legs are black, and the iris is dark brown. A white stripe crosses the black rump, and its width changes between subspecies. The sexes look alike, though the female is a little smaller. Young birds lack the gloss, show a pink cheek patch and carry a shorter tail. Adults moult every year after they breed, from June or July to September or October. Replacing the main flight feathers takes about three months.

Habitat and range

The range crosses temperate Eurasia from Portugal, Spain and Ireland to the Kamchatka Peninsula. The bird wants open ground with a few tall trees on it. Treeless country and closed forest both hold very few magpies. Parks, gardens and suburbs suit it well, and it breeds in them at high density. Birds turn up close to the centre of a large city.

In Sweden the magpie lives only where people live. A Swedish bird that sits far from any house is a rare find. Archaeology suggests the birds began scavenging around Scandinavian settlements in the Iron Age. Most magpies stay near their territory all winter. Birds at the northern edge of the range may move south when the weather turns hard. One bird reached Port Fuad in Egypt in 2023, probably aboard a ship in the Suez Canal.

Diet and feeding

The magpie eats almost anything it can handle. Insects probably make up much of the summer food. It takes eggs and nestlings from the nests of smaller birds. It also kills small mammals and picks over carrion. Acorns, grain and other plant food carry it through the cold months. Scraps from streets and gardens feed the birds that live in towns.

Magpies hide food and come back to it in another season. That habit suggests a memory for both place and time. A parent cuts food into pieces that match the size of its chicks. In the wild the birds form gangs and work together to catch other birds. Like other crows, the magpie learns fast where a meal is reliable.

Behaviour and social life

A breeding pair holds one territory and returns to it year after year. Birds that have no territory live in flocks until they get one. Some magpies breed at one year old, and others wait for their second year. In winter the birds gather at dusk and sleep in a group. They will share a roost with starlings, thrushes, pigeons and jackdaws.

Magpies also gang up to drive a predator away from their ground. Observers have recorded elaborate social rituals at the body of a dead magpie. Some writers read those rituals as grief, and that may go further than the evidence. Captive birds use tools to clean their cage. They have also counted their way to a reward and copied human speech.

Communication and senses

The usual call is a hard rattling chatter, written as chac-chac. A bird may repeat the note many times when something disturbs it. Young birds add a sharp uik that sounds like a small dog. Adults and young can both make a hiss that is hard to hear at any distance. A courting male drops his voice to soft notes that carry none of the usual rattle.

Display appears to matter as much as sound in this species. The male lifts and lowers his crown feathers and fans his tail. He pulls his flank feathers over the wing to show the white shoulder. The magpie also passed the mirror test, which very few animals have done. A marked bird seems to treat the reflection as itself, because it picks at the mark.

Reproduction and life cycle

Magpies are monogamous, and a pair often stays together for several seasons. Mating happens in spring, after a display of feathers, tail and soft calls. Short bouncing flights and chases follow the display. The pair builds a bulky nest in a fork high in a tall tree. Where trees are scarce they will settle for a bush or a hedge.

The birds bind a frame of sticks with mud and clay, then line it with fine roots. Over the cup they build a loose dome of thorny twigs with one hidden way in. The nests stand out once the leaves fall. In 2023 biologists found magpie nests built from metal anti-bird spikes. One nest from Antwerp in Belgium holds about 1500 of those spikes. The birds set them in the dome, where the spikes keep other birds off the chicks.

A European clutch usually holds five or six eggs, and April is the usual month. Clutches of three and of ten have both been recorded. An egg is pale blue-green with olive brown specks and weighs about 9.9 grams. The female sits for 21 to 22 days while the male brings her food. Chicks hatch nearly naked with their eyes shut, and they open them after seven or eight days. They fledge at about 27 days, and only three or four of a brood get that far.

Predators and threats

Hunger kills more nestlings than any predator does. The eggs hatch on different days, so the youngest chick starves first in a poor year. Some nests are still lost whole to predators. Fledglings fly badly for their first weeks, and both parents guard them. A study near Sheffield found that only 22 percent of fledglings reached one year old.

Adults that clear that first year survive at about 69 percent a year. The average life then works out at 3.7 years. The oldest known magpie lived 21 years and 8 months. That bird was ringed near Coventry in 1925 and shot in 1947. People have shot magpies for centuries, probably to protect game birds and songbirds.

Population and conservation

The magpie holds what may be one of the largest ranges of any land bird. Europe holds an estimated 7.5 to 19 million breeding pairs. Counting the birds on other continents gives 46 to 228 million individuals. The European trend has been stable since 1980. The IUCN therefore lists the species as Least Concern.

Regional lists may tell a smaller story here and there. Finland placed the magpie on its national red list as Near Threatened in 2019. Austria treats the bird as not at risk. iNaturalist holds 180,144 observations of the species. GBIF has records from 100 countries.

Relationship with humans

Few wild birds seem to live as close to people as this one. It feeds on scraps, nests in garden trees and walks on the pavement. Bones from Scandinavian sites suggest the habit is thousands of years old. Gardeners and gamekeepers have long blamed the bird for the loss of songbirds. The magpie does eat eggs and chicks, so the charge has a basis.

Careful studies do not support the wider claim. One found no effect of magpie numbers on the growth of songbird populations. Another found more small songbirds where magpies were common. Britain ran a children's television programme named after the bird from 1968 to 1980. Football clubs in several countries carry the magpie as a nickname, probably for the black and white colours.

In culture and myth

European folklore has treated the magpie badly for centuries. The folklorist Steve Roud notes that British tradition reads large black birds as evil. A Victorian book of household knowledge records a proverb about a single magpie and foul weather. The same book explains that a pair only forages together in fine weather. In Scotland a magpie at the window is said to foretell a death.

English tradition says a greeting will turn away the bad luck of a lone bird. A Shropshire version tells the speaker to defy the devil and spit three times. The counting rhyme One for Sorrow reads the future from the number of birds seen. Its first printed version dates from 1780, and a longer one from 1846. A Lancashire version counts as far as thirteen birds.

Italian, British and French stories give the bird a taste for jewels and coins. Rossini built the opera La gazza ladra on that idea. A recent study casts doubt on whether magpies like shiny things at all. In Hungarian tradition a singing magpie announces that guests are on the way. In Norwegian tradition it is a thief, and also the bird of the hidden people. In Chinese and Korean tradition the magpie brings good luck, though that bird is now a separate species.