Eurasian magpie

Based on Wikipedia: Eurasian magpie

In 2008, scientists placed a small yellow sticker on a magpie's throat, positioned where the bird couldn't see it without a mirror. Then they put the magpie in front of a reflective surface and watched. The bird looked at its reflection, noticed the yellow mark, and immediately began scratching at its own throat to remove it. When researchers repeated the experiment with a black sticker that blended into the feathers, the bird showed no interest. The magpie understood that it was looking at itself.

This might not sound revolutionary until you consider what it means. The mirror test, as it's called, is the gold standard for determining whether an animal possesses self-awareness. Before 2008, only great apes, dolphins, and elephants had passed it. The magpie became the first bird ever recorded to demonstrate this capability, and it remains the only non-mammalian species known to do so.

We share the planet with a creature whose brain, relative to its body size, is comparable to that of a chimpanzee or a human. That creature can recognize itself in mirrors, count objects, use tools, and engage in what researchers describe as elaborate social rituals that may include expressions of grief. It remembers where it hid food across seasons. It can predict what other magpies will do based on its own experience. In captivity, it imitates human speech and uses implements to clean its cage.

And most of us think of it as a pest.

The Bird in Black and White

The Eurasian magpie, known scientifically as Pica pica, lives across the northern stretch of the Eurasian continent, from Portugal and Ireland in the west all the way to Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula in the east. It's a corvid, meaning it belongs to the crow family, that remarkable group of birds that also includes ravens, jays, and jackdaws. When English speakers in Europe say "magpie" without any qualifier, they mean this bird. The only other magpie on the continent is the Iberian magpie, which, as its name suggests, stays confined to Spain and Portugal.

The Eurasian magpie looks almost identical to North America's black-billed magpie. For a long time, scientists considered them the same species. But in 2000, the American Ornithologists' Union examined their vocalizations and behavior more closely and decided they were different enough to warrant separation. The American bird, it turned out, was more closely related to the yellow-billed magpie of California than to its apparent twin across the Atlantic.

If you've never looked closely at a magpie, you might think of it simply as a black and white bird. This undersells the animal considerably. The head, neck, and breast are glossy black, yes, but that black carries an iridescent sheen that shifts between metallic green and violet depending on the light. The belly and shoulder feathers are pure white. The wings, black at first glance, reveal green or purple glosses when the sun catches them right. The tail, which accounts for more than half the bird's total length, shimmers with green and reddish purple.

That tail is extraordinary in its proportions. An adult male measures about forty-four to forty-six centimeters from beak to tail tip. The tail alone stretches between twelve and twenty-eight centimeters. Females are slightly smaller but similarly proportioned. Both sexes weigh less than you might expect for a bird this visually dramatic, males averaging around two hundred and forty grams, females somewhat less.

Recently, in 2023, magpies appeared in Egypt for the first time in recorded history, spotted in the Nile River Delta. Local observers, encountering this unfamiliar bird with its striking black and white pattern, gave it a nickname that stuck: Panda Crows. The name misses the beautiful blue hidden in the plumage, but depending on lighting and distance, those blue feathers can appear dark enough to merge with the black, making "panda" a reasonable first impression.

What's in a Name

The word "magpie" has a strange origin, and understanding it tells you something about how people have perceived this bird for centuries.

Originally, the bird was simply called a "pie." This word likely derives from an ancient Proto-Indo-European root meaning "pointed," probably referring to the beak or that remarkable tail. The term dates back to at least the thirteenth century. When people started using "pied" in the 1550s to describe any animal with black and white coloring, they were making a direct comparison to this bird.

The "mag" part came later, appearing in the sixteenth century. It's short for Margaret, which at the time served as a generic name for women, much like "Joe" or "Jack" did for men. The bird earned this feminine prefix because of its call, a rapid chattering sound that people associated with idle female conversation. The magpie, in other words, got its name from a sexist joke about women talking too much.

The scientific name is more dignified but no more imaginative. When the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus formally classified the bird in 1758, he placed it in the crow genus and called it Corvus pica. Two years later, the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson moved it to its own genus, simply named Pica, which is the classical Latin word for this particular bird. So Pica pica, the current scientific name, essentially means "magpie magpie."

A Mind Like an Ape

The magpie's brain contains a structure called the nidopallium. In birds, this region handles many of the functions that the neocortex manages in mammals, including complex cognition and problem-solving. When scientists measure the relative size of the nidopallium in magpies and compare it to similar brain structures in other animals, they find something remarkable.

The magpie's nidopallium, adjusted for body size, is approximately as large as the equivalent regions in chimpanzees and humans. It's significantly larger than those in gibbons. When you compare total brain-to-body mass ratio, magpies match most great apes and cetaceans.

This presents an interesting puzzle for evolutionary biologists. Birds and mammals diverged from a common ancestor hundreds of millions of years ago. If magpies and apes both developed complex intelligence, they did so independently, following completely separate evolutionary paths. Scientists call this convergent evolution, and the magpie represents one of its most striking examples in the cognitive realm.

A 2004 review of corvid intelligence concluded that the crow family, which includes magpies, demonstrates capabilities equivalent to great apes across multiple domains. These include social cognition, the ability to understand and predict the behavior of other individuals. They include causal reasoning, understanding cause and effect relationships. They include flexibility, the capacity to adapt behavior based on changing circumstances. And they include what researchers carefully term "imagination and prospection," the ability to think about things that aren't immediately present, including future events.

What Smart Birds Do

Let me be concrete about what magpie intelligence looks like in practice.

Magpies hide food. This alone isn't unusual; many animals cache food. What's unusual is that magpies remember where they've hidden things across seasons, demonstrating what scientists call episodic memory, the ability to recall specific events from the past. Even more impressively, magpies seem to understand that other magpies might steal their caches. A magpie that notices another bird watching while it hides food will often return later and move the cache to a new location. It uses its own experience as a thief to predict that others might behave the same way.

Magpies use tools. In captivity, they've been observed employing objects to clean their cages. They can learn to count to receive food rewards. They imitate human speech. In the wild, they organize into groups that employ coordinated strategies when hunting other birds or defending against predators.

One behavior particularly demonstrates their cognitive sophistication: portion control for their young. Parent magpies cut food into pieces sized appropriately for their chicks. This requires understanding that the chick is a different size than themselves and adjusting behavior accordingly, a form of perspective-taking that many animals cannot manage.

Then there are the social rituals. Researchers have observed magpies gathering around dead members of their species in what appears to be some form of response to death. Whether this constitutes "grief" in any sense we would recognize remains debated, but the behavior itself is undeniable and unusual.

The Architecture of Survival

Magpies build remarkable nests, and a discovery in 2023 revealed just how adaptable their construction skills can be.

A typical magpie nest is a large, elaborate structure built high in the fork of a tall tree. The birds create a framework of sticks, then cement it together with mud and clay. The same materials line the interior. But here's what makes magpie nests unusual: they build a dome over the top, a protective roof of prickly branches with a single concealed entrance. The complete structure is so large and conspicuous that it becomes visible from a distance once autumn strips the leaves away.

In 2023, biologists in Antwerp, Belgium, discovered a nest made partially from anti-bird spikes. These are the sharp metal implements that humans install on buildings to prevent birds from landing. A magpie had collected approximately fifteen hundred of these spikes and incorporated them into its nest's dome, positioning them to deter predators from reaching its chicks.

Think about what this means. The bird encountered an object designed specifically to repel birds. Rather than avoiding it, the magpie recognized that the very quality making it unpleasant, those sharp metal points, could serve a useful purpose. It collected the spikes, transported them to its nest, and installed them as defensive fortifications. The birds essentially reverse-engineered human anti-bird technology for their own benefit.

That nest now sits in the collection of Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands.

A Year in the Life

Magpies mate for life, or something close to it. Pairs typically stay together from one breeding season to the next, occupying the same territory year after year. Some birds breed in their first year; others spend that initial year in non-breeding flocks and wait until their second year to raise young.

Courtship happens in spring. The male's display involves rapidly raising and lowering the feathers on his head while lifting and fanning his tail. He calls in soft tones quite different from his usual chattering. He rearranges his plumage to make the white patches on his shoulders as conspicuous as possible. If the female is interested, short buoyant flights and chases follow.

In Europe, eggs arrive in April, usually five or six to a clutch, though anywhere from three to ten is possible. The eggs themselves are small for a bird of this size, pale blue-green with olive-brown speckles, though coloration varies considerably. The female handles all the incubation, sitting on the eggs for twenty-one to twenty-two days while the male brings her food.

The chicks hatch nearly naked with their eyes closed. They're entirely helpless, what scientists call altricial, dependent on their parents for everything. The mother broods them for the first five to ten days. Both parents feed the growing chicks, at first consuming their waste and later simply letting the chicks defecate over the edge of the nest. Eyes open after about a week. Body feathers appear around day eight, wing feathers around day ten.

Young magpies leave the nest at roughly twenty-seven days old, but they can't fly well yet, which makes them vulnerable. The parents continue feeding and protecting them for several more weeks. On average, only three or four chicks from a clutch survive to this stage. Some nests fail to predation, but starvation kills more young magpies than predators do. Magpie eggs hatch at different times, and when food is scarce, the last chicks to emerge rarely survive.

That first year is brutal. A study near Sheffield, England, using color-coded leg bands to track individual birds, found that only twenty-two percent of fledglings made it to their first birthday. After that, survival improves dramatically. Adult magpies have a sixty-nine percent annual survival rate, which translates to an average lifespan of about 3.7 years for birds that make it past their first year. The record stands at twenty-one years and eight months, set by a bird near Coventry that was banded in 1925 and shot in 1947.

Living Alongside Humans

Here's something that might surprise you: in Sweden, it's essentially impossible to find a magpie more than a few hundred meters from a human dwelling. The birds have become so thoroughly associated with human settlements that they've functionally disappeared from truly wild areas.

This isn't new. Archaeological evidence suggests that magpies became scavengers around human communities during the Scandinavian Bronze Age, roughly three thousand years ago, and certainly by the Iron Age. For millennia, these birds have been our neighbors, thriving in the environments we create.

Magpies prefer open countryside with scattered trees. They avoid both treeless plains and dense forests. But suburban areas with parks and gardens suit them perfectly. They'll nest surprisingly close to city centers. What they need are tall trees for their enormous nests, open ground for foraging, and a reliable food supply. Human settlements provide all three.

Most magpies are sedentary, staying near their nesting territories even in winter. Only those living at the northernmost edges of their range, in Sweden, Finland, and Russia, migrate southward when conditions become truly harsh.

They eat almost anything. Young birds and eggs from other nests. Small mammals. Insects. Carrion and scraps. Acorns and grain and other plant material. This dietary flexibility, combined with their intelligence and adaptability, helps explain their success across such a vast geographic range.

The global population is enormous. Europe alone hosts somewhere between 7.5 and 19 million breeding pairs. Across all continents where they occur, estimates range from 46 to 228 million individual birds. Numbers have been stable since at least 1980. The International Union for Conservation of Nature classifies the species as being of "Least Concern," the lowest risk category.

The Weight of Superstition

Despite their intelligence and adaptability, or perhaps because of their comfort around humans, magpies have accumulated centuries of negative associations in European folklore.

The problem, according to folklore researcher Steve Roud, is guilt by association. "Large black birds, like crows and ravens, are viewed as evil in British folklore," he explains, "and white birds are viewed as good." The magpie, being both, got sorted into the negative category by virtue of its corvid relatives.

A nineteenth-century reference book called A Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar records this proverb: "A single magpie in spring, foul weather will bring." The book explains that magpies typically travel in pairs, so seeing a lone magpie suggested that its mate might have died, which country people interpreted as a bad omen for the weather and, by extension, for anything else one might be planning.

This superstitious framework generated countless regional variations. Different numbers of magpies meant different things, from sorrow to joy to a letter coming in the mail. The specifics varied by location, but the underlying assumption remained constant: magpies were significant, and their presence demanded interpretation.

It's a strange fate for one of the most intelligent creatures on Earth. The bird that can recognize itself in a mirror, that uses tools and counts objects and may grieve for its dead, has spent centuries in European culture as a symbol of bad luck and idle chatter. The name we gave it immortalizes an ancient sexist joke. The folklore we built around it treats it as an omen rather than an animal.

The magpie, of course, doesn't care what we think. It goes on building its elaborate nests, sometimes from our own anti-bird spikes. It goes on thriving in our suburbs and parks and city edges. It goes on watching us with those dark intelligent eyes, perhaps understanding more about us than we've ever bothered to learn about it.