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Whatsapp An Australian Magpie (right) sings in the morning light, reinforcing its ownership of the territory.

Australians may think they know everything there is to know about the magpie, but there's a lot hidden under the surface: from the intricacies of their mating habits to why their numbers are in decline. Ann Jones investigates.

For the weary traveller, the sound of the magpie calling in the dawn light after a long flight from the other side of the world is perhaps the most Australian of welcome homes.

For the wary walker, the sound of the wind whizzing past the stiff, angry feathers of the magpie and the snap of its beak are enough to make even the most confident of adults retract their head into their shoulders and scurry along like a chastised, maltese terrier with its tail between its legs.

They live in a tiny patch. Now, if that tiny patch includes people, as it does in every suburb in every part of Australia, they know—and this is no exaggeration—they know all the people that live there.

We love them, we fear them and we probably don't know as much about them as we should.

Australian magpies are named for their song—Cracticus tibicen, where tibicen means 'flautist'. As one very unkind British acquaintance of mine once said, they sound like some sort of 'demented keyboard'.

'Some people claim that it's actually got the most complex call of any bird—that unbelievably glorious carolling that they do in the morning, especially during the breeding season,' says Associate Professor Darryl Jones, deputy director of Griffith University's Environmental Futures Centre.

The species occurs almost everywhere in Australia. They're a fixed part of our landscape on the sports fields, and in the soundscape of our mornings. We name companies, sports teams, after them and come to expect them to be right there, in our backyards, standing regally on the edge of our balconies. But will they be there forever?

The latest Birdlife Australia State of Australian Birds report indicated that in the east coast region—from about Rockhampton to the Victorian border—Australian magpie numbers have declined by 31 per cent since 1998.

'The decline in magpies in several regions was a surprise result, and as yet no investigations have been undertaken to discover why. And because we don't know why, we can't say what the key risk factors are,' says Sean Dooley, editor of Birdlife Australia's magazine Australian Birdlife.

'However, while we are shouldn't speculate on the reasons the species is declining in some places, I would suspect the areas worth investigating should focus on the use of pesticides in agricultural landscapes, competition from growing numbers of aggressive species such as corvids, currawongs, maybe noisy miners.

'Also interaction with feral cat numbers could be interesting—could the nests be raided or are they reducing the amount of prey available to maggies? And of course it could just be loss of productivity across the landscape due to general drought conditions.'

This is particularly alarming given the Bureau of Meteorology's reports on El Niño conditions.

It's hard to imagine a football oval without a couple of magpies walking purposefully across it. They're adapted to do that bipedal walk, much like plovers or waders do, and not hippity-hopping like ravens. Magpies can also run, but will do so only in short bursts, wings akimbo, beak slightly ajar.

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Whatsapp Australian Magpie listening for prey lurking beneath the grass.

The walking ability lets them be close to the earth, listening and watching for the signs of prey beneath the grass. They walk across the grass, turning their head from side to side. They're triangulating the prey lurking beneath your lawn.

A good territory with lots of invertebrates underneath the grass is hard to come by and that's why a magpie will spend its whole life protecting it once if it's lucky enough to establish it.

'The magpies are a bit unusual—no, they're very unusual: they are territorial every single day of every single year. They never give up being territorial, which means they're just protecting and patrolling and making sure that no other magpies come into their spot,' Jones says.

'If you think, "oh that might be the magpie I saw yesterday" and you live there, that's absolutely correct: those magpies will not have moved. These magpies live for sometimes 20 years, at least. So it can be the same magpies that you saw as a child, and now you're a bit older, or your kids were raised with those magpies. It's probably the same magpies.

'They live in a tiny patch. Now, if that tiny patch includes people, as it does in every suburb in every part of Australia, they know—and this is no exaggeration—they know all the people that live there.

'They know all the individual humans that live in the patch, we've proven that. We've done experiments where we put different masks on different people and they are responding to their faces.'

It's only the lucky magpies that find fertile terrain and a good partner to protect it with. But territoriality and swooping humans are separate things.

'Almost all the swooping occurs when there are chicks in the nest, only when there're chicks in the nest,' Jones says.

'We think it's entirely about brood defence. It's typically the male whose job it is to keep predators away form his precious chicks, he's simply trying to ... keep these dangerous humans away from precious chicks.'

This makes the swooping understandable, but no less dangerous. Jones estimates that between five and 10 eyes are lost each year to Australian magpie attacks.

'We have strong evidence that the average is 12 per cent of breeding males in suburban territories show some level of anti-human aggro though less than 5 per cent actually make contact,' Jones says.

When the magpie is particularly aggressive, or its territory is located in an area near vulnerable people, such as a childcare centre, the bird may have to be 'managed'. This means the male is typically taken away and released elsewhere where it can potentially make a living for itself.

'This is a 'mate for life' species, which against all the odds has found a great place to live and a great mate to raise its children with, and suddenly humans have intervened and taken away half of the equation,' Jones says.

'What on earth will happen? In lots of species, probably most infamously among African lions, if a African lion is replaced by a younger male ... the very first thing that happens, totally natural, absolutely tragic, absolutely appalling, is that the new male will just kill all the cubs because they're not related to him.

'So I found myself in the situation of being the manager, and being the person who was actually taking away and disrupting this very stable social arrangement between these two magpies, and thinking "Oh my goodness, am I going to actually contribute to basically infanticide?"'

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Whatsapp Australian Magpies are bipedal - they're adapted to walk rather than hop, and will only run short distances.

In fact, Jones says, the male who had mated 'for life' with the female is immediately replaced, typically within a few hours.

'A new male has shown up and said "I've heard that you need a new mate, what do you need time to do, I'm ready to go and I will take advantage of this opportunity."

'So extraordinarily for us, she accepts him instantly, well she probably has to out of absolute desperation—she's got starving kids, but more importantly, she's got a territory to defend.

'So she says, in a sense ... to the new guy—"I'm desperate. You'll do." So the new male, unrelated, this goes against all evolutionary principles, unrelated to the chicks, starts feeding them at a higher than even their true father would do.'

In more than 80 per cent of the cases where Jones' research team removed the male, a new male came in and helped raise the chicks successfully.

On top of this apparent ease of partner replacement, magpies partake in extra-pair copulations—that is, they have sex with other magpies even when their main partner is alive and well.

It turns out that 'mating for life' is not as black and white and dead-set romantic as we might assume.

Perhaps with magpies, familiarity leaves us with an idea of deep understanding and permanence, neither of which is the case.

We have much to learn beyond the ice-cream bucket hats with eyes drawn on the back of our childhoods. Hopefully, the magpie's illustrious dawntime carol is not confined to memory on Australia's east coast any time soon.

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