Get off!!!

If you don't want to know the result look away now......

Yesterday morning Mrs Booty and I were watching the bird feeders and felt a degree of paternal pride as the first two sparrow chicks, still shaking off their fluffy feathers, made it to the garden and started hopping around after mum and dad; we congratulated ourselves on being a magpie free zone which means we have dozens of song birds nesting around us. Less than a minute later a male magpie landed, everything fled.

Mr Booty took umbrage. Out came the Larsen Trap and a piece of chicken leg was thrown in. The magpie duly entered the trap and in the parlance of the Guardroom, "Clang, mind your fingers!" He was then transferred to the holding cage which is twice the size of the trap.

His partner came down and tried to rescue him, frustrated by our neighbour appearing in her garden she went off to their nest. The trap had been in the greenhouse overnight to prevent the local moggies annoying George, (all the calling birds, as the trapped bird is known, are named after the serving Chancellor of the Exchequer). At 0545 the trap was placed back in the garden, George began hammering on the perch, which is used as a Tom-Tom to signal other magpies. His partner came down immediately and was in the adjoining trap by 0600.

All songbirds are terrified by magpies, they destroy their eggs and kill the young. However it is very noticeable that the songbirds recognise that the trapped birds are unable to hurt them. They feed around the traps pulling bugs and worms from the soil which drives the magpies loopy. This bird in the picture is the female. I have to wear leather gloves to handle them as their beaks are very sharp, slightly serrated and very pointed. In the series of images taken this is the central shot, a fraction of a second later she had rolled her head over and was trying to cut the leather and pull it away at the same time. Meanwhile her claws were working overtime. About 20 seconds later she was dead.

Cruel facts of life. They probably have a nest of chicks of their own. The chicks are fed on young songbirds, roadkill etc. The other magpies in the group will attack the chicks and feed them to their young. The adult birds will then come down and try to kill the adult male who is in the holding cage. They are viciously territorial, will not tolerate any other strangers or unattached adults in their colony. Obviously this is a contentious subject, we, the humans, stopped "managing" the population of magpies many years ago by taking them off the controlled list of Corvids (political stupidity and lack of understanding), consequently their population boomed. They are now back on the list, but there are few people who have the knowledge or equipment to control their numbers. When they are controlled a balance is achieved between corvid and songbirds; left to their own devices the magpie will decimate the smaller bird population, not just to satisfy the need to feed it's young, but out of pure killer instinct.