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Australia’s Clever Birds Didn’t Accept This Science Experiment


The Australian magpie is one of the most intelligent birds in the world. It has a beautiful song of extraordinary complexity. It can recognize and remember up to 30 different human faces.

But Australians know magpies best for their mischievous tendencies. An enduring rite of passage of an Australian childhood is to flee each spring from the birds that come down to attack what they see as a threat.

The Magpies’ final mischief was to outwit the scientists who studied them. scientists a Study published last month in the Australian journal Field Ornithology He uncovered a rather extraordinary example of how intelligent magpies really are, and in the nature of birds helping one another with no apparent tangible benefit to themselves in the process.

In 2019, Dominique Potvin, an animal ecologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, began studying the social behavior of magpies. She and her team spent nearly six months perfecting a harness that would carry miniature tracking devices in a way that would not expose them to magpie interference. They believed it would be nearly impossible for magpies to remove the harnesses from their own bodies.

Dr. Potvin and his crew hooked up their tracking devices, and the birds flew away with no obvious signs of distress. Then everything started to unravel.

“The first tracker was disabled half an hour after we plugged it in,” he said. “We were literally packing our gear and watching it happen.”

In remarkable collaboration, the magpie wearing the tracker remained motionless, while the other magpie worked on the harness with its beak. Within 20 minutes, the helping magpie found the only weak spot – but a single clasp a millimeter long – and slashed it with its beak. Dr. Potvin and his team then saw different magpies remove the harnesses of two other birds equipped with them.

It took six months for the scientists to reach this point. In three days the magpies had removed all five devices.

Dr. “It was heartbreaking at first,” Potvin said, “but we didn’t realize how special it was. We turned to the literature and asked ourselves, ‘What did we miss?’ we asked. But there was nothing because it was actually a new behavior.”

Dr. The only such instance, which Potvin describes as “altruistic rescue behavior”—where birds help other birds without receiving tangible benefits in return—is Seychelles warbler helped other members of their social group escape the sticky seed clumps in which they were tangled.

Magpie behavior, Dr. Potvin said it’s “a special combination of helping and also problem solving, being really social, and having this cognitive ability to solve puzzles.”

“This is probably partly why they have been so successful in our changing environment on farms and in urban areas,” he said. “They managed to solve everything in a new way.”

The Australian magpie is a large black and white perching songbird or songbird that inhabits about 90 percent of the Australian mainland. It is a common presence in parks and backyards across the country.

Remarkably, magpies can recognize as many as 30 people’s faces, which is the average number living in a magpie territory. “Beards very rarely attack more than one or two individuals,” said magpie expert Darryl Jones of Griffith University. “It’s the same people they attack every time.”

Magpies also have long memories: Dr. One of Jones’ research assistants was attacked when a bird returned from his territory 15 years later.

As Sean Dooley, Birdlife Australia’s public relations manager, puts it, “If you think it’s personal, you’re right.”

If more than 30 people pass through a bird’s territory, “they actually start stereotyping people,” said Mr. Dooley.

“People who look like 10-year-old boys are much more likely to win, because they’re more kids throwing sticks and stones, shouting, chasing magpies, and running.”

Dr. Jones calls the magpie’s “great, marvelous hymn song” another example of their intelligence.

With over 300 individual elements, it’s “incredibly complex. It takes a big brain to accurately remember and repeat a song of this complexity every morning.”

Dr. Potvin and his team scrapped their original work. But they can’t help thinking about the bigger question: “What else can beards do?”



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