Ron's blog

Just a quick note to let you know that Vicky definitely has two very big bubs in her nest. Amazingly, her bubs are always very quiet. We don't hear a lot of squarking for food from them, and they always look very contented in the nest. I hope they stay in there a bit longer and get good and strong before they enture out.

At the end of last week I thought Vicky and Sophie both had babies in their nests, because they were both stacking food and flying back. Sadly, suddenly Sophie stopped and became miserable again, so it seems she has lost a second clutch this year. So many birds seem to have had bad luck in the district. It is odd, because the weather is wetter than it has been (it was drought for years until now), and one would think they know how to rear their babies in a wet season with lots of bugs to feed them. But many of our friends have also told us their magpies have lost babies.

The other day on the news there was a child who was attacked by a magpie, and tragically his eye was damaged. He was an amazing kid: the reporter asked him whose fault it was and he said Dad's, because dad forgot to tell him not to ride his bike in the magpie season. I wondered why it was only dad and not mum, but apart from that, it's a pretty wise way to look on life. But what I wanted to think about today was whether anything positive can be done to improve the sometimes poor relations between people and magpies.

I mentioned a while back that our neighbour's magpies, Billy and Polly, had had three or four bubs, and then I said I hadn't seen them around. Today Billy came down to see us after Maggie had gone off to his back paddock, and he stacked his beak and flew into the tree, where there were two bubs waiting. Good old Billy, who couldn't think about anything but his own stomach for years and who gave his poor old dad (now departed) apoplexy trying to get him to behave like a decent magpie, is now dutifully fathering his own kids. Good on you Billy!

Since meeting Maggie I have never ceased to be amazed by how well the birds understand each other from different species, and how that understanding even extends to humans. We learned early on that they understood the concept of names.