Australian magpies remember faces, and may spare the people they know
Every spring a small number of Australian magpies, nearly always males, swoop at anyone who strays near their nests. Yet the same birds can recognise at least 100 individual people, and research suggests they are less likely to dive at humans they have befriended. Being on good terms with the local magpie apparently pays.
Despite the name, this is no true magpie. European settlers named it for its black-and-white resemblance to the Eurasian magpie, a member of the crow family, but the Australian bird belongs to a different family, alongside butcherbirds, currawongs and woodswallows. A 2013 genetic study found its closest relative is the black butcherbird, the two lineages having split sometime in the Pliocene, roughly 5.8 to 3.0 million years ago. Its scientific name notes its bare nostrils and, via the Latin tibicen, a flute player, its famously musical voice.
That voice makes it one of Australia's most accomplished songbirds, and early colonists called it the piping poller, piping shrike or flute-bird. Aboriginal languages have dozens of names for it, from carrak in western Victoria to koorlbardi among the Noongar of the southwest. Long-legged, it strides across lawns and paddocks rather than hopping, hunting mainly invertebrates, and it thrives in parks, gardens and farmland.
For much of the twentieth century scientists treated black-backed, white-backed and western magpies as three species, until it became clear they interbred freely wherever their ranges met, producing grey or striped-backed hybrids. Since 1969 they have been lumped as one species with nine subspecies, which tend to grow larger toward the south, apart from a small Tasmanian form. One long-billed race in Western Australia was thought by its describer to have evolved its slender bill for picking at scorpions and spiders. A New Guinean subspecies is genetically close to western Australian birds, hinting that their ancestors lived on a savannah land bridge that sank around 16,500 years ago.
Settlers exported the bird too. More than 1,000 were released in New Zealand between 1864 and 1874, where they are now regarded as a pest that displaces native birds. Back home it is South Australia's state emblem and the mascot of sports clubs such as Collingwood.
Source: Australian magpie
