I’ll be the first to admit I thoroughly enjoy all the “holy shit, Australia” posts that circulate around here but I feel like there’s a very important caveat when it comes to the discussion of swooping season that no one seems to mention.
For those not aware, swooping season is when the magpies start to nest and turn into mini dive-bombers comprised of talons, feathers and spite. It’s not fun. I bled heavily after a particularly vicious swoop when I was a kid, and I’m definitely not the only one.
But here’s the thing: swooping is not an innate behaviour. It’s a learned one. I realised this the moment I moved out of home and began my decade long (entirely unintentional) habit of moving to a different suburb every two years.
I’ve met a lot of wildlife, walking everywhere as I do. And I’ve met a lot of magpies – hella intelligent creatures that are probably thinking “what the fuck is this chick doing” every time I say hi to them as I walk past.
When I first moved out of home, I automatically started taking notes on areas I saw magpies in preparation for swooping season. It was just the done thing. It wasn’t until September came and went and the magpies in my area continued their quizzical but otherwise completely non-aggressive behaviour that it started to twig with me.
The next few years of moving around solidified my suspicions.
Anytime I lived close to a school or in an area with a high concentration of families with young kids, the magpies would swoop. Any suburb (usually inner city) with a high concentration of childless households and/or share-houses: no swooping to be seen.
And it’s any goddamn wonder.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve yelled at kids for messing with wildlife. I grew up in the outer suburbs, so there was no shortage of mini-assholes with an empathy shortage. Australian kids will poke anything they can reach with a stick, and throw rocks at everything else. Including birds nests.
Magpies are intelligent as hell, and they remember shit for GENERATIONS. Some human-shaped fucker throwing rocks at them and their nests? That’s something that’d stick.
So anytime you read one of those “lol the birds try to kill us here” posts, remember: it’s not the birds that started that shit – it was the asshole humans.
Adding on to the fact that magpies are super intelligent:
In primary school there were these really huge gum trees in which a family of magpies took up residence one year.
(an important thing to note is that I grew up in the country with A LOT of magpies -that were basically like relatives for the amount of time they spent on the veranda- and never encountered any swooping)
So one morning walking in to school I noticed that all the kids ahead of me were giving the really huge gum trees a wide berth, with other kids shouting warnings from the buildings. Being an airy-headed little kid, I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were actually saying, so I just kept walking straight under the trees.
Nothing happened.
I got to the buildings and asked why everyone was making a big fuss about the trees, and one of my friends just pointed back the way I came and said “the birds!”
And sure enough, any of the other kids that tried to walk under the trees got immediately swooped and chased to what the magpies thought was a good distance from their nests.
Magpies not only remember humans that are mean to them, but they recognise humans that have been given the seal of approval by other magpies.
I miscalculated the distance, and I slammed into the window, headfirst.
Are you a pigeon
Do pigeons do that?
Loudly and hilariously, yes
A while back, a large woodpecker(a fantastically stupid bird, I’ve noticed) hit my glass balcony door so hard it dazed itself, and sat on its ass, wings lax to its sides, visibly reeling like in a cartoon. It then recovered, and promptly flew into the black metal railing of my balcony before finally escaping through the bars into the wooded area beyond.
And yeah, had a lot of mourning doves hit the door, too.
[Woman: *kisses raven’s beak* Even though you are naughty, I still love you, aye.]
#goals
Stop everyone! These are the Knaresborough Castle ravens, and this ‘naughty’ raven is probably Izzie: the only bird in the UK to have been given an ASBO (a criminal conviction for anti-social behaviour).
Izzie pretends to get her head stuck in trash, so that when people get up to help her she can fly off and steal their sandwiches. She can mimic human speech, but does not do it often and when she does speak it’s usually rude. When we met the lady in chain mail in July 2013, she told us that Izzie had once flown up to a tourist and said “who the **** are you looking at?!”. The tourist was very offended and assumed it was the chain mail lady who had spoken. The birds are not on chains for their own protection, but for their bad behaviour. They are literally on the naughty step.
I went to Knaresborough on a day the ravens weren’t there, and I was disappointed. I asked the castle attendant when they would be back, and he said he didn’t know. The Raven Lady isn’t associated with the castle. She’s just someone with pet ravens who comes and goes when she pleases and likes to wear chain mail. Life goals or wife goals?
Thank you for adding this, I was going to reblog it again with some info tonight and you beat me to it! Yes this one was Isobella! She also steals cameras from people, she pretends to have her foot stuck in an old water bottle and then goes and nicks stuff from the people who try to help her omfg
Waiting for Winter 