In an Irish context, the phrase “Swooping Season” likely sounds like the sort of soft folk-rock band your friend Declan and a few insufferable guys he went to school with have been trying to make work.
A band that would make the manner of interchangeable, peppy song about homecoming or nights out that might be featured in an advert for health insurance. Songs with irritating, reachy titles that launder a mass-produced version of Irish culture for global consumption – names such as “Spice Bag Lament”, and “Toxic Measculinity”.
Swooping Season is not, to my knowledge, a cringe-inducing Irish band (though if they turn up after the publication date listed on this article, we’ll all know what happened). Swooping Season is a time-honoured Australian tradition in which hormonal local wildlife conspires and then actively attempts to hurt you over a period of weeks, to the backdrop of objectively charming Spring weather. The kind of weather Keats might have composed a poem about if he’d had the opportunity.
Birds in Australia are kind of like birds in Ireland, except generally five times the size and almost certainly on cocaine. Some of them have the capacity to speak English.
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Most appear to believe that humans are not welcome here.
They reel out of the sky at you like they’re barrelling out of a nightclub bathroom wearing a floral shirt open to the navel, beaks atwitch, roaring a garbled query that sounds disturbingly like: “What did you just say to me?”
The bass of terrible house music pounds as you wonder if your family will ever see you again or they’ll have to identify your unrecognisably disfigured remains after they’re found with the back of the head pecked off.
Australian society is rule-following rather than norm following, which may be why people are so accepting when, every spring around now, magpies which look more like black-and-white crows than the rounded, dainty, poetic-looking cads we have at home take against the country en masse. The ones we have in Ireland are Eurasian magpies, and their little cocktail stick legs and white-feathered pot bellies give a relatable impression of inconsistent moral courage and a sybaritic lifestyle.
You can imagine them in a moment of personal weakness, ordering a single toasted sandwich with a €14 delivery fee via Just Eat while draped across a chaise longue.
For the majority of the year, Australian magpies are good neighbours – they are entertaining, substantial tuxedo-clad scoundrels. They’re funny and beautiful and can mimic noises from the environment around them like car alarms or camera shutters. They saunter about fancily in their formal attire. They stop what they’re doing as you walk past them, deigning to look at you like you’re unmitigated scum and I have nothing but respect for it.
If they could figure out email, they would undoubtedly launch a coup and establish an authoritarian state. Until they master how to bcc other magpies, however, they remain beloved local mascots rather than an overt threat to Australian national security.
Yet, during spring, in September and October, things change.
Magpie supremacy moves from a theoretical realm solely inside the minds of magpies and into the material world. While their babies are little, some of the male birds appear to become both paranoid and insane, zooming down from their nests to attack unwitting passersby far below. They are brigands who want to steal not your worldly goods but your will to leave the house, fostering a special loathing for bikes and scooters, though pedestrians aren’t entirely safe either. The magpies come at you from behind and at speed, and they go for the head and ears.
I’ve passed Australians bleeding affably from the head in the street. They respond to mildly panicked inquiries about their welfare with merriment. “Oh yeah! I got swooped! My own fault – I forgot my helmet!" they’ll chuckle, like someone with Stockholm syndrome. They press a balled tissue to their bleeding pate and continue on their way to work.
If Irish birds – the humble robin or the starlings who pepper Limerick’s Bedford Row with their gluey effluent – turned on the population like this for up to two months every calendar year, there would be mass evacuation or a cull. Adolescents would shelter in place for fear of the potential damage to their curated hairstyles. Pensioners would cower in their homes and demand relevant tax cuts. Citizens would be on the streets with placards or baseball bats, and RTÉ Radio 1 would have received calls on no other topic for the entirety of his career. Stayaliveline. “They’re coming from above! It’s a disgrace.”
Cycling back from the gym last year, my husband was terrorised for five consecutive minutes by one particularly zealous magpie dad
Australians follow rules, and there are rules for swooping season. The general level of respect for wildlife here is very high. If you know there is a risk of furious birds descending from the skies to brain you (and you do – there are signs posted in public places and it’s hard to forget after your first swooping), then it’s on you to take appropriate measures. Find a new, far longer and less convenient route to work if the usual one takes you down a tree-lined avenue that is densely packed with enraged and proud new avian fathers. Cycling your toddler to preschool? Place a helmet festooned with upright zip ties, hedgehog style, on her little cranium to protect it, or perhaps hire an actor to cycle ahead of you transporting a dummy toddler, and just hope the magpies target the decoy.
[ Loving Ireland is easy. Living in it, not so muchOpens in new window ]
Cycling back from the gym last year, my husband was terrorised for five consecutive minutes by one particularly zealous magpie dad, whose protective determination to knock his quarry into oncoming traffic is admirable in an age of sometimes lax paternal responsibility.
He came in the door (my husband, not the magpie – though you wouldn’t put it past them) with a couple “of walnut-sized welts on the back of his head. “I got got!” he declared like a man shot in the back in a spaghetti western, before opening the fridge in search of a bag of frozen peas. “It’s my own fault”, he murmured in a slightly zombified tone that suggested magpies might have placed listening devices in the apartment. “I should have varied my route.”
