Magpies

I grew up pretty much on the east coast of the United States, and the only things I knew about magpies were that they were birds and they liked to collect shiny things. I grew up with Heckle and Jeckle, the magpies in Paul Terry's cartoons, but I knew they were cartoons and never expected to see a bird smoking a cigar; but I did think that magpies were black with yellow bills. When I first visited my sister in Boulder in the early 1970s, I was amazed to find that magpies were multi-colored and had wonderfully long tails. It was astonishing. Today, after walking Rosie and Remy, we settled into the Snow back yard, as usual. (The Rs' house remodeling is almost finished!) I sat down with my book in the sunshine, having thrown Rosie's bone and Boo's ball. There was no wind, it was still outside; I could hear chickadees and nuthatches "talking" in the trees. Then I heard a branch creak. I was so startled by the creaking branch, with absolutely no wind to move the boughs, that I tilted my head back to look up into the cottonwood tree overhead. There sat a magpie; and as I watched it, it again produced the sound of branches rubbing against each other. I had to laugh. Earlier in the week, I had thought I heard a woodpecker or flicker drumming a tree branch for its' food - but it was a magpie reproducing the drumming sound while sitting in a rose bush. They can create quite a wide variety of sounds, being a member of the corvid (crow and raven) family. We humans have a larynx at the top of our trachea as our "voice box." The vocal organ of birds, in contrast, is a unique bony structure called a syrinx, which lies at the lower end of the trachea, is surrounded by an air sac, and may be deep in the breast cavity. It is two separate structures, which is how birds can create such disparate tunes and/or noises at one time. The magpie chooses it's mate for life, and will generally return to the same nesting site each year. The female lays 4 to 7 eggs each year, of which only 3 or 4 hatch and live to adulthood. The magpie lives an average of 4 to 6 years in the wild.