It’s that season again!
Yep, it’s
almost magpie swooping season again. Some people hate them, others love them.
Either way, they are just protecting their nests. I’m in “love them” category.
Why? It goes back to my childhood.
In my early
school years (1950s), my family lived in a, somewhat less than salubrious, town
called Salisbury North, just north of Adelaide. It was, however, a young kids’
paradise, being on the edge of the bush.
We spent
every spare moment in the bush, hunting rabbits, lizards and snakes. Yep,
snakes. That leads me to another story about a sack full of snakes and a
community Guy Fawkes Day bonfire. I’ll tell that one later. We also went
hunting for fledgling baby magpies to steal from their nest, to keep and raise
as pets. They make great pets. We never cut their wings and they were free to
fly away at anytime, which they usually did, after about a year.
As you may
imagine, pinching baby magpies from their nests was fraught with a smidge of danger,
due to their parents being slightly more than a little pissed off.
Jmagine this.
Two 8 year old boys, bare footed and wearing shorts and short sleeved shirts,
with no head coverings, riding their rickety old bicycles down a dirt country
road while each holding the end of an old, wooden ladder. “Why would we do
that?”, you ask, or not.
Along side
that dirt road, grew large boxthorn bushes, upon which the maggies built their
nests. Hence the ladder. One of us would scoot up the ladder as fast a we
could, grab a couple of baby magpies, almost ready to leave the nest, gently
put them inside our shirts and escaping, with parents in hot pursuit, swooping
the hell out of us, almost all the way home. We always abandoned the ladder for
a few months for safety’s sake, while whizzing a long piece of bamboo above our
heads and riding like hell.
The downside
was multiple chunks of skin missing, due to successful swoops from angry
magpies and deep scratches from the bloody boxthorn bushes. The upside was we
each had a beautiful pet magpie that, almost instantly became part of the
family for the next year, until they flew away.
I always called my pet magpie Foster Williams, who was a player/coach of the Magpies (Port Adelaide Football Club).
That’s why I love magpies.
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