Local ABC 666 was reporting at their mid-day bulletin that another outcome of the ACT Governments tough budget will be that Environment ACT (or Urban Services or whatever their called now) will no longer be dealing with problem or nuisance magpies. Seems that previously if you got jack of a magpie swooping you every time you left the house you could call a hotline and a nice man from the Government would come around with a slug-gun and dispose of the nuisance bird.
Vicki Dunn has apparently been quoted as saying that this is yet another example of the kind of services that Canberran’s will have to get used to living without because of the Stanhope Governments incompetent financial management.
Another interesting fact.
The magpie is actually a pied butcher bird. There is another butcher bird that looks almost exactly the same as a magpie but the markings are slightly different.
they are called ‘port power’ birds.
Thumper and others
The Australian Magpie is closely related to the Pied Butcherbird (rare here, common out west) and the Grey Butcherbird (more common here than Pied BB) Some photos of the three are here.
The zone between white-backed and black-backed magpies is to our south. You can see all sorts of variations in the amount of white in the back in individuals around town.
Some more stuff on maggie races and swooping avoidance tips here.
The back of the neck in males is pure white. Females have a grey wash through the white neck.
I’m told that magpie gonads swell to 20 times their normal size during breeding. I reckon we’d all be cranky too if that happened to us
RA got a good long mention about this issue on Radio SGS yesterday afternoon.
In fact they quoted three or four quotes.