The ivy bush by my window affords endless pleasure. It’s huge. The outer reaches host an evening roost of house sparrows. In the league of creatures who make a racket entirely disproportionate to their size, house sparrows are up there with wrens and shrews. But they are more sociable and don’t sound so cross. For several years, the ivy’s inner reaches have been home to a pair of magpies, whose calls one eminent ornithologist unkindly compared to the sound of machine-gun fire. They have a greater range than that. Their chirrupings and chucklings are amiably tuneful.
I’m at a loss to understand why magpies are so widely disliked. For me, they are among the most beautiful of birds. Whoever held the palette when creating their plumage was one of the great artists. If you think of them merely as noisy monochrome crows, look again. Green, bronze, purple, touches of azure, hints of red, iridescence – all add depth and complexity to that overall piebald patterning.
The garden is an interesting place at the moment. Four or five dowdy, short-tailed magpie young have spilled out of the dome-shaped nest in the heart of the ivy and are hiding out under shrubs. Whenever I, or my large and placid cat – after early exploits involving pheasants, gulls and hares, she considers her status as supreme hunter unassailable and now simply basks in the sun to observe garden proceedings with a dispassionate eye – approach too closely, the machine guns start up and we’re forced into hasty retreats.
But I love all crows – magpies and ravens especially. Their intelligence is striking. Forty years ago, as I encountered an old gamekeeper I knew at the edge of a wood, a magpie flew out. He threw up his gun and brought the bird down. “I’ll put that on the gibbet later,” he commented, and walked off to feed his pheasant poults. I counted five magpies flying towards the shot bird. They landed, hopped round crooning softly, prodding it with their beaks, laying grass on it. Say I’m anthropomorphising if you will, but there was concern, grief even, in their behaviour. After they had dispersed I walked back, picked up the limp corpse, carried it into the wood and laid it to rest under moss and leaves, respectfully.
