WonderQuest:  On the web since 1997...      

Heckle and Jeckle’s revenge

Q: Why do magpies like shiny things like jewels and watches? (Lanney, Sandia Park, New Mexico)

European Magpie: a bird about 18 inches (45 cm) long with a tail more than half its length. [Courtesy of Adrian Pingstone of Gloucestershire, England]

A: It’s a cool spring sunny day in Bellaterra, a small town near Barcelona in northwest Spain. A black and white magpie strides into a corner of a walled garden. Long black tail slightly down, black eyes scrutinizing the ground. Past a small green bush he finds a spot that looks familiar and pauses. Perhaps he consults his sun-related compass. Recalling the cache record, he thinks, "I should find a nut here."

He sweeps the ground with his beak. Back and forth like a broom. The nearby little bush bobs with the motion. Leaves and dirt fly. Aha! Something. Yellow and round. He pecks at it — cleaning, moving it around. He seizes the nut with the tip of his beak, hops triumphantly out, and disappears.

Why do magpies like shiny things? Because magpies are intelligent curious beings that like to explore. Shiny things interest them as toys, play-pretties, or something to stash away. They like to hoard.

A magpie hoards food as she finds it to stretch good times into the future. She could risks travel perils and migrate, like swallows, to lands with plentiful food. She could scrounge on the barest edge of survival through the winter, like chickadees. But she doesn’t. Instead, she chooses a frugal life style.

A magpie, though a loud boisterous animal, takes her livelihood seriously and hoards right after she learns to fly.

A close-up of a European magpie in Scotland that captures the bird’s essence. [Courtesy of James Keith Lindsey, © used with permission.]

"In captive magpies, food storing begins at age of about 32 days," reports biopyschologists Bettina Pollok, Helmut Prior, and Onur Güntürkün in a recent study at the Ruhr-Universität at Bochum, Germany.

The researchers found, by 42 days, a magpie retrieves food. By 55 days, she "graduates" with fully developed miserly skills about two weeks before she leaves her parents (and their food provisions).

By then, she can put a food item into a hole, cleft, or under a leaf with a fast fluent movement. She can hammer it into the niche with a couple of rapid beak strokes and cover it swiftly with leaves or debris. She can retrieve it a day or so later.

Magpies scatter their hoards, deposit a single nut in a cache, and only store the food for a day or a few days (as opposed to jays and nutcrackers that save for months). So, an important aspect of the job is continuously updating their memory record of places that still have food and those that are empty (robbed or already retrieved).

By the age of parental independence (about 70 days), the studied magpies easily updated memory records kept on two or three hiding places.

Not bad for a bird that doesn’t fly until age 27 days. Caching skills, however, don’t come automatically. Young birds practice. All kinds of non-food objects attract them — including jewels and watches. Pollok and her team found that their magpies performed all hoarding and retrieving tasks equally well regardless whether they used food or non-food objects. It didn’t matter.

Further Reading:

Bettina Pollock, Helmut Prior, and Onür Güntürkün, "Development of object permanence in food-storing magpies" Journal Comparative Psychology. 2000 Jun;114(2):148-57.

James Keith Lindsey, A European magpie, its habitat, and food in pictures

Christopher Perrins, ed. Firefly encyclopedia of birds. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books (US), 2003.

Wikipedia: Magpie

US Geological Survey: Magpie as observed and commented on by Lewis & Clark

Magpie in nature and myth by Peter Chou

(Answered Nov. 8, 2005)