Whenever I notice a scarcity of small birds in the neighbourhood - and I've been noticing one lately - my suspicions always fall on the magpie, a species that never seems to be short supply. There's the neighbour's cat too, of course - often seen in stalking mode. But the cat's glory days are long behind her, and I seriously doubt if she could take a bird any more, except in her fantasies, writes Frank McNally.
Magpies are the usual suspects of the avian world, not least because there are always a few of them hanging around the scene of a crime. If a rubbish bag gets punctured, the trail of used tea-bags and wet kitchen paper invariably leads to a magpie, loitering with intent nearby. The bird's reputation as a master jewel thief, however unfounded, also goes before it. And in general, its name is dirt.
True, in that great fit-up that is the English collective-noun system, the magpie has escaped the raps for which other predominantly black birds have gone down, on circumstantial evidence. "A murder of crows", for example, would struggle to establish their innocence of any charge, while "an unkindness of ravens" is another miscarriage of justice waiting to happen (especially when it emerges in testimony that the accused is a member of the crow family). The magpie is a crow too, in fact. But a group of magpies is known as nothing worse than a "tiding", due presumably to one the many superstitions attached to the bird: as a portent of news.
Where did magpies get their bad image? It can't be the colour alone. Blackbirds are universally popular, their musical talents even inspiring a Beatles song (on, of all places, the White Album). Not only that, but the magpie's black-and-white combination is a public relations success for other animals, from the Friesian cow to the 101 Dalmatians. Piebald horses are generally considered a good thing, too, except at the racecourse.
A reputation for bullying doesn't explain it either. I may be correct to implicate the magpie in the apparent disappearance of my local robin. But as Eanna Ni Lamhna points out in her book Straight Talking Wild, bird killing is not all black and white. Cute as the red-breasted miniatures are, robin-on-robin violence, to the death occasionally, is not unknown.
And if your cat is younger than my neighbour's, it probably kills more robins than the magpie does. Not only that, Ni Lamhna writes, but the cat does it just for fun, in between the canned meals you feed him: "At least [the magpies] are hungry, and the robin is part of their food chain." The magpie's unpopularity goes well beyond its reputation as a thief, killer, and disturber of bins, in fact. It's not that the bird is associated exclusively with bad luck. As the famous rhyme suggests, it can be considered a good omen in certain combinations. It's the sheer amount of the lore surrounding the magpie that sets it apart.
According to the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, its reputation stretches back to the Biblical flood. A vicar in 19th-century Durham reported one of his servants explaining that the magpie was the only bird that did not go into Noah's ark, because "it liked better to sit outside, jabbering over the drowned world". In another tradition, the bird was created during the flood, its colour scheme marking it as offspring of the first two creatures sent out of the ark: the raven and the dove.
The magpie was sometimes called the "devil bird", because it was believed to have a drop of the devil's blood in its tongue. This may have been why a single magpie was dreaded. At any rate, elaborate rituals grew up about how to take protective action when you met one: ranging from spitting, to making the sign of the cross, to in some cases addressing the bird, either politely or defiantly.
The last ritual was still alive late into the 20th century, according to the book. "Speaking and bowing to magpies was quite a common thing and to this day I still nod my head and politely say 'Good Morning, sir' when I catch sight of one," said a source in Oxfordshire in 1969.
The magpie is a relatively recent arrival in Ireland, blown - according to Ni Lamhna - from Wales to Wexford in a storm during the 1670s. Most of the lore seems to have blown after him. A belief recorded in Longford in 1936 held that "if a magpie chatter 12 times near a house [ you should] expect a letter soon". But half a century earlier, a similar saying was recorded in northeast Scotland, where a magpie hopping near a house was an "unfailing indication of the coming of good news, particularly from a far country".
This last example contradicts the general othodoxy of the superstitious: that a solitary magpie means misfortune. "One for sorrow" is the most consistent part of the rhyme, the rest of which differs from place to place in these islands. But ill-omened as it was, traditionally, the magpie was also protected, according to a legend recorded in Connemara.
"It is unlucky to kill a magpie or rob its nest, because if either of these are done they will kill all your chickens and geese," a source there said in 1884. "I have seen people abused and even pelted for shooting a magpie in a village." Thus, to the magpie's many survival talents can be added membership of the bird world's untouchables. Small wonder that this unloved blow-in has so thrived here. But it's an ill wind, etc, and the superstitious have some cause to relax. Such is the magpie's evolutionary success - at least around where I live - that you rarely see just one of them.