Maggie in Flight (No Not Thatcher)

Just arrived home after the morning visit to the Livery, and there was a magpie outside the house. I have tried a couple of times to get a photo. This shot appealed more than ones of it just siting on a branch or lawn.

Magpies are birds of the corvidae (crow) family, including the black and white Eurasian Magpie, which is one of the few animal species known to be able to recognize itself in a mirror test.

With its noisy chattering, black-and-white plumage and long tail, there is nothing else quite like the magpie in the UK. When seen close-up its black plumage takes on an altogether more colourful hue with a purplish-blue iridescent sheen to the wing feathers, and a green gloss to the tail. Magpies seem to be jacks-of-all-trades - scavengers, predators and pest-destroyers; their challenging, almost arrogant attitude has won them few friends. Non-breeding birds will gather together in flocks.

With its aggressive behavior and appetite for young chicks, the magpie doesn't have a particularly good image when it comes to compassion. But according to some experts, the predator may have a tender side, feeling grief and routinely holding 'funerals' for fallen friends. Dr Marc Bekoff claims the rituals - which involve birds laying 'wreaths' of grass alongside roadside corpses - are proof animals feel complex emotions.

Animal behavior expert Dr Bekoff, of the University of Colorado had an encounter with four magpies alongside a magpie corpse as proof that animals have a 'moral intelligence'.

We salute you: Birds such as this yellow-billed magpie may have a more sympathetic side to their character than their notoriously harsh image. One approached the corpse, gently pecked at it, just as an elephant would nose the carcass of another elephant, and stepped back,' he said. 'Another magpie did the same thing. Next, one of the magpies flew off, brought back some grass and laid it by the corpse. Another magpie did the same. Then all four stood vigil for a few seconds and one by one flew off.'

After publishing an account of the funeral he received emails from people who had seen the same ritual in magpies, ravens and crows.

'We can't know what they were actually thinking or feeling, but reading their action there's no reason not to believe these birds were saying a magpie farewell to their friend,' he writes in the journal Emotion, Space and Society.