Magpies pass the mirror test, a feat few birds manage
The Eurasian magpie (Pica pica) breeds across northern Eurasia and ranks among the cleverest birds alive. Part of its forebrain is, relative to size, about as expanded as the brains of great apes and humans, and it is one of very few bird species known to recognise itself in a mirror.
It belongs to the crow family, the corvids, and to a group of black-and-white magpies spread around the northern hemisphere. In Europe English speakers simply call it the magpie, since the only other European species, the Iberian magpie, is confined to the Iberian Peninsula. The Australian magpie looks similar but is a different kind of bird altogether, related only at a much broader level.
Naturalists have argued over its boundaries for centuries. Conrad Gessner described and pictured it in 1555; Linnaeus named it Corvus pica in 1758, and Mathurin Jacques Brisson gave it its own genus, Pica, the Latin word for the bird, in 1760. The North American black-billed magpie looks almost identical and was once lumped in with it, but in 2000 the American Ornithologists' Union separated them after studies of calls and behaviour showed the American bird was closer to the yellow-billed magpie. Populations blend gradually across the range, so authorities disagree on subspecies; the International Ornithological Congress accepts six, from Scandinavia and the British Isles to Kamchatka. Birds in North Africa, southwest Arabia, southern China and west-central China are now treated as separate species, and DNA work shows magpies of eastern China differ genetically from those in northwestern China and Spain.
The name has a gossipy history. The birds were first called pies, via French from the Latin pica, a word perhaps rooted in an ancient Indo-European term for woodpeckers and other sharp-beaked birds. Pie for the bird dates from the thirteenth century, and pied, first recorded in 1552, came to describe other black-and-white birds. The mag prefix appears in French as margot la pie in 1573 and in English as magot pie in Shakespeare's Macbeth of 1606. It likely comes from Margaret, once a catch-all name for women, because the call was likened to idle chatter.
The intelligence claim rests on the nidopallium, a brain region whose relative expansion in magpies roughly equals that seen in chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and people.
Source: Eurasian magpie
