The morning television news reported gangland violence in Melbourne and Sydney. Closer to home, trouble stirred in my own backyard.
A family of magpies – pushing out black-and-white breasts like in-your-face Collingwood supporters – had arrived in the ’hood.
To say they had caused a flurry of feathers would be an under-statement. The usual standover merchants in the neighbourhood, the forest ravens and grey currawongs, resisted at first but then stood aside. The magpie army meant business.
Magpies in Tasmania are not supposed to be aggressive, like their mainland counterparts. Noted bird expert Eric Woehler says they lack the aggression gene, losing that aspect of their DNA when the local magpies first arrived all those millennia ago, before rising seas saw Tasmania become an island.
No targeting posties here in spring, although the residents of Clarence St on the Eastern Shore might dispute this, with an errant magpie causing havoc there a few years back.
My street in the Waterworks Valley had proved a magpie-free zone from the time I moved into my home two decades ago. Clearly the wet forest straddling both sides of the valley did not suit magpies, and the closest place I found them was four kilometres distant, in the dry woodland of the Queens Domain.
Occasionally I’d see magpies passing overhead to destinations unknown and so I was surprised to hear the familiar magpie song coming from a neighbour’s garden in early winter; along with the alarm cry of an agitated raven, and the squawk of a grey currawong. The magpies had clearly moved in. It was the same at the Waterworks Reserve later in the day, when a raven there was put to flight from its roost on a fence post. It engaged in a spiralling, mid-air fight, before conceding the airways to its pied foe.
I would have thought the raven, with bulk and fearsome beak, presented more than a match for the slighter and more elegant “maggie”, but nature like individual birds is always capable of springing surprises.
In my case, it’s been good to add the magpies to the checklist of birds spotted in the garden. No bird – other than, perhaps, the sulphur-crested cockatoo – is more emblematic of this land than the magpie and its beautiful fluting song.
By coincidence, a version of the magpie song had featured in a recording played at a Birdlife Tasmania meeting during the week I first saw the magpies. I learned that, along with the song, magpies were capable of mimicry. A magpie was taped repeating virtually the whole playlist of the birds in the surrounding woods. Then I discovered on YouTube a video of a magpie emitting the sound of a fire-truck siren during a bushfire emergency in country Victoria.
Closer to home, I now await our new arrivals unsettling the ravens and currawongs even further – by stealing their songs.