Tis the season to be swooped

A message of distress pings through on my phone from a friend. She’s been swooped by a magpie. Attacked. The message contains expletives. The accompanying photos show blood – small wounds near my friend’s ear and alarmingly close to her eye. She was riding her bike when the magpie swooped. She put her hands up to fight him off, he kept coming at her. Her finger was bloodied as she shielded her face. She pedalled away, head down.

She can walk the same path and not get swooped; ride her horse past and the magpie ignores her. That’s the thing with magpie swooping; it’s very specific.

There’s a standard joke that the animal Australians fear most isn’t a snake or spider or shark or crocodile. It’s a magpie. Perhaps because we all have tales of ourselves or friends getting the warning swoop – that whoosh of feathers and clack of beak that says ‘get out of here’ loud and clear. Or worse, when contact is actually made like in my friend’s recent experience.

The worst I have ever heard was of a woman in the town where I grew up who lost an eye to a swooping magpie. Not as in the magpie pecked her eye out deliberately, not that macabre, but rather that it swooped her as she stood up and hit her in the eye, which surgery could not save. Purely bad timing on the woman’s part. The irony was that she was the person most likely to take an orphaned magpie chick into her home and raise it, or pick a sick or injured bird from the side of the road and nurse it back to health.

(Image courtesy Beverly Buckley, Pixabay)

Speaking on a fascinating podcast, Professor Darryl Jones, an Australian urban ecologist, describes magpies as ‘the most important and widespread suburban wildlife conflict in Australia.’ He says magpies only swoop when they have chicks in the nest, not when they are building nests or have eggs, and they stop when the chicks fledge the nest. Peak swooping season is around October and by now, most chicks in most areas will have fledged so attacks will soon stop, if they haven’t already. But even at the height of swooping season, not all magpies swoop and even those that do swoop, don’t swoop everyone. They’re selective in who or what they antagonise. Some hate cyclists. Some hate dogs. Some get a set against a particular individual and hold the grudge for the rest of their lives. They recognise faces. Bad luck if one takes exception to you!

Again, to quote Professor Jones, 6-12 per cent of magpie groups have a swooping protector. Mostly, they will just fly in low, clacking their beaks aggressively. It’s only the dominant male that swoops. (Here in Western Australia, you can easily tell male and female magpies apart because the males have white backs and the females have greyish backs – the feathers on their backs are black with white edges. But there are several different races of magpies that occupy specific ranges across the continent and, elsewhere in Australia, the differences between the sexes are less obvious.)

Whatever the colouring on his back, the magpie male is swooping to protect the chicks. Some, like the one that attacks my cycling friend, are particularly aggressive and are best avoided until breeding season is well over. The males don’t just swoop, they also do their fair share of feeding the chicks. They’re very egalitarian like that, and the chicks are very demanding – just listen to one squawking for food as it stands on the grass beak open waiting for a doting parent to shove a morsel down its throat.

(Image courtesy Daniel Burkett, Pixabay)

Magpies are territorial and will usually only defend an area up to 100 metres from their nest. Admittedly, that can feel like a very long way when you are under attack.

When I was at uni, I participated in a study on magpie territories. Each year, a group of biology students mapped the territories of the magpie troupes on the campus. The maps from year to year were compared. Most of the territory boundaries remained relatively stable for many years, but there was one area of contested ground that shifted between three family troupes. It was the large courtyard where students gathered to sit around on the grass, chat and eat. There were tall trees and open grassland – perfect magpie habitat; it’s the prevalence of areas such as this that have made magpies so successful in colonising the suburbs.

On the university campus, the contested courtyard shifted between the magpie troupes from year to year. Sometimes it was held for a couple of years, but eventually, the dominating troupe would be ousted.

Interestingly, it was useless to try to study the magpies in the courtyard on weekends and during non-teaching weeks. When the students weren’t around, the courtyard lost its strong appeal to magpies and there were hardly any birds around. But around mid-day on a normal teaching day, the magpies would gather, awaiting lunch. Despite this, I don’t recall any incidents of students being swooped. Maybe the magpies’ nests were far enough distant that it wasn’t ground to be defended in that way. Or maybe they knew it was better to let the students stay because they provided a reliable food source.

Thanks for reading,

Jill