Magpie!

 I saw my first Black-billed Magpie on a long May weekend in 1966 when, having lied to my parents that I was camping around Chilliwack well within a safe drive of my home town of Mission, I accompanied to two older birder friends, Ron and Jim, into the Cascades where we spent the first night camped on the banks of the Similkameen at Hedley. It was my first trip past Hope and I was agog with the possibilities of “new” birds. Early Saturday morning, as we drove farther east towards Osoyoos, we passed under a powerline upon which perched a long tailed black and white bird. From my obsessive nightly study of the few bird books I had access to at the time, I recognized it instantly as a lifer, a Black-billed Magpie. At the time, rolling along in Ron’s old Ford, excited by all the new sights, it was just another bird on my growing life list, certainly not as memorable as the male Calliope Hummingbird I had watched as it visited its “trapline” of purple penstemons around a rocky hill near Hedley, or the male White-winged Crossbill glowing pink-red that we had stumbled upon the day before in Manning Park.

Black-billed Magpie (Pica hudsonia)

It wasn’t until after my wife and I had moved to Fort St. John in 1975 that I began to appreciate what a complex and fascinating bird the magpie is. It’s a bird of pleasing design. C.H. Trost who wrote the 1999 BNA account (#389) described it as “strikingly marked and conspicuous”. Florence Merriam Bailey (1908) in a wonderfully dated simile introduced the magpie as “a black air-ship with white side-wheelers and long black rudder”. J.A. Munro (1950) focuses more closely on the magpie’s plumage. “Actually, only the head, neck, and part of the back are black: the closed wings are iridescent blue; the great wedge-shaped tail, as long as the body, is iridescent green.” As to the bird’s personality, it has been described as “interesting”, “knowing”, “resourceful”, “audacious”, “unscrupulous”, “perfectly confident”, and “a bird amply able to take of itself”. Clearly the Black-billed Magpie is a bird that leaves strong impressions upon its viewers.

At Fort St. John, it certainly left an impression upon me, as I saw magpies flying around in the snowy fields and bare shelter belts at the beginning of my first northern winter. Here was one of the few birds that did not leave the area. It was tough, hardy, irrepressable. It could handle -35, -40 Celsius with aplomb. A magpie was proof that life existed in spite of the harsh climate. Southerners don’t know what it’s like to walk through a northern landscape where your steaming breath and squeaky footsteps on the dry snow seem your only company, when the intense cold, the skeletal bare aspens and the dark green of spruce along the gulleys are a backdrop apparently empty of all other higher life forms. Suddenly with an upward inflected “yerk”, a magpie flies up the ravine and over your head, black and white against the big empty cold blue of space and suddenly you’re a little warmer, knowing you’re not alone.

 Only relatively recently have the Black-billed Magpie (Pica hudsonia) of North America and the Common Magpie (Pica pica) of Eurasian been separated by taxonomists into two species. The two species have different vocalizations, social behaviour, and spacing (Trost 1999), but look so similar that it’s not surprising that following its discovery on the plains and mountains of western North America, the Black-billed Magpie was saddled with the reputation of its Eurasian relative.

The Black-billed Magpie has a peculiar flight:
4 or 5 deep wing beats are followed by a sudden "hitch" as if the bird hit a mini air pocket. 

However, early in its relationship with Europeans and Britons, the Black-billed Magpie was regarded like the Eurasian Magpie as a friendly consumer of insects and rodents and fairly harmless mischief maker. Lewis and Clark noted that magpies sometimes even hopped into the tents of the Plains Indians in search of meat. Some were tame enough to take food from the hand. This rather affectionate attitude towards Black-billed Magpies changed drastically. As Tim Birkhead explains, “with the increase in game preservation in the 18th and 19th centuries the [Eurasian Magpie] ceased to be popular in Europe because of its habit of taking gamebird eggs and chicks.” (215-216). Once gamekeepers set their minds against the magpie, they and their Victorian overlords emphasized his darker habits such as nest robbing and added him to the long list of undesireable wildlife that they insisted responsible managers of land should eliminate. Thus began campaigns against magpies in the great estates of the Old World.

 In the New World, extermination of food sources like the American Bison and the introduction of livestock in the West likely caused a profound series of changes in the foraging of the Black-billed Magpie. The planting of shelter belts and treed gardens enabled edge-species like Baltimore Orioles and American Robins to spread across the formerly tree-less plains. Quick to take advantage of this situation, the Black-billed Magpie, like its European relative, was soon seen by the bird-loving farmers as a ruthless, cruel and calculating villain, a destroyer of songbirds’ eggs and a murderer of their chicks. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the second reason for the negative shift in the European attitude toward the magpie was developing. The magpie transferred its habit of picking and eating ticks from deer and wild sheep to tick-picking cattle, horses, and mules. These domesticated animals, often lacking basic vet care, sometimes bore saddle-sores and other unhealed wounds that magpies picked at and sometimes enlarged. Cattle bearing the fresh burns of recent branding were prime targets for the magpie’s not so benign ministrations. One source notes that sometimes the bird’s picking would even obscure the brand on the flank of the cow. Every fan of Westerns knows what happens when you mess with a rancher’s livestock – a range war, this one against magpies.

Like many members of the crow family, the magpie has a pouch
at the base of its beak where it can store food. 

 In 1927 U.S. federal biologisr E.R. Kalmbach published his research into the Black-billed Magpie’s relationship with American agriculture. On the whole he found the species beneficial, and helpful in controlling outbreaks of insect pests. Carnivorous by nature, it only consumes grain when there is nothing else to eat. However, in addition to his analysis of the contents of 547 magpie stomachs, he summarized some of the campaigns, either directly or indirectly being waged against magpies:

During campaigns against coyotes in the winter of 1921-22 along Butter Creek,in Umatilla, Oregon, it was conservatively estimated that 5,000 magpies were killed. In Douglas County, Colorado, magpies were practically exterminated in the country covered by poison lines placed for coyotes in the winter of 1922-23. In the winter of 1921-22 a coyote campaign planned for Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, Nevada, called for preliminary measures against magpies. On the first day after placing baits, three grain sacks full of dead magpies were picked up. In one poison station at Summit, Utah, 143 of these birds were accounted for within a few days.


The local poisoning of magpies described by Kalmbach also occurred closer to home. The British traveler J.K. Lord in his explorations of the interior of Gold Rush B.C. also visited Colville, Washington State, just south of the border where he claims to have witnessed the following incident:

To the packer the magpies are dire enemies… If a pack horse or mule has a gall…[the magpie] pecks away at the wound…This repeated agony soon kills the animal, unless the packers rescue it… at our winter mule camp …[magpies] gradually accumulated ..until they were in the hundreds…We had an old maimed suffering mule which was to be killed, so the packers gave it a ball containing a large dose of strychnine; death was immediate, and the carcass, ere ten minutes had lapsed, was covered with magpies working at the eyes, lips, sores and soft skin inside the thighs. It was the most singular spectacle I ever witnessed. One after the other birds rolled off the dead mule, and as they fell, others greedily took their vacant places; and so this terrible slaughter went on until heaps of dead magpies nearly buried the body of the mule…

“Heaps of magpies” sounds, well, a tad exaggerated, but the wholesale slaughter of wildlife whether it was buffalo, wolves, coyotes, or magpies, was common and not only tolerated but encouraged in the West at the time.

 A final example of magpie slaughter was published is mentioned in A. C. Bent’s Life Histories of North American Jays, Crows and Titmice:

The hatred that many people hold for the magpie has found expression in the carrying on of contests in an attempt to “exterminate” the species. An item from a newspaper in British Columbia gives some results of one of the contests as it was conducted in 1931 in the Okanagan Lakes region. Two teams of six persons each, killed a total of 1033 magpies in one season. (p.148)

Magpies were wiped out locally so that they didn't eat poisoned bait intended for coyotes. They were exterminated because some learned to pick at sores on livestock. Others were killed because local myth had labelled the magpie as a nuisance. Even if much of the magpie slaughter was incidental, the birds being a kind of “by-catch” when the intended victims were coyotes, it is clear that no one grieved the avian carnage. As J.A. Munro, Dominion Wildlife officer in B.C., observed in 1950 “…public sentiment is definitely anti-magpie” and "if anyone grieved the wholesale killing of magpies, he/she left no mention of it."

 Even today it’s not hard to find people in B.C. who will tell you that magpies are solely responsible for the decrease in songbirds experienced throughout the magpie’s range. Such ideas are often predicated upon a perceived local increase in magpie numbers, which, given our opening up of many areas that were formerly forested and therefore unsuitable for magpies may be real. Magpies, like Canada Geese, European Starlings, House Wrens, Bullock’s Orioles, American Robins, Red-tailed Hawks and a host of other species, some of them labeled nuisance wildlife, find our treed yards, lawns, and our little parks, ponds and golf courses much to their liking and have within the last half century spread into areas like B.C. Peace River where they were unknown in the 1930’s. What the magpie-hater doesn't consider is that the magpie is a highly conspicuous bird. It's a flashy black and white bird that's hard to miss, a real attention-getter. When a magpie raids a songbird nest, chances are the householder is going to notice. Crows and jays, though every bit as predacious as magpies, are far sneakier and probably take many more songbird eggs and nestlings than the magpie does. However, the magpie as the noisy tree top sitter with the long tail, gets the blame. Given our historic bias against magpies and our sordid record of shooting and poisoning them, is it any wonder that Black-billed Magpies are wary of us?

 End of Part One.

 If you have a comment about this column or any true magpie stories that you would like to share with the author, write Chris Siddle at chris.siddle@gmail.com.

 References:

 Angell.  Tony. 1978, Ravens, Crows, Magpies and Jays. University of Washington Press, In Canada Douglas and McInTyre, North Vancouver.

Bailey, Forence Merriam. 1908. Handbook of Birds of the Western United States, third ed. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

 Birkhead, Tim. The Magpies: the ecology and behavious of Black-billed and Yellow-billed Magpies.
1991. T.D. Poyser, London.

Cannings, R.A., Cannings, R. J. and Cannings, S.G. 1987. Birds of the Okanagan Valley, Canada. Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria.

Cocker, Mark and Richard Mabey. 2005. Birds Britannica. Chatto &Windus, London.

Linsdale, J.M. “American Magpie” in A.C. Bent. 1946. Life Histories of North American Jays, Crows and Titmice. Smithsonian Institution United States Publishing Office, United States National Museum, Washington, D.C.

Munro, J.A. 1950. Birds of Canada’s Mountain Parks. Dept. of Resources and Development, Ottawa. 

Taverner, P.A. Birds of Western Canada, second ed. 1928. National Museum of Canada, Ottawa. 

Trost, C.A. 1999. Black-billed Magpie (Pica pica). In The Birds of North America, No. 389 (A. Poole and F. Gill, eds.). The Birds of North America, Inc., Philadelphia.

(An earlier version of Magpie! appeared in BC Birding, Volume 27 (2) - June 2017. )