My heart is with the magpie, though :(

mccardey

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Because I don't live in The Hills.
The bird was deemed a "significant risk to public safety" and an assessment by NPWS found the bird was engaging in different behaviour to regular protective swooping."[It was] swooping underneath helmets ... to attack people's faces," a council spokesperson said in a statement.

"This bird was very aggressive and uncharacteristically territorial."

Poor little magpie *sob*
 

Robots

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I love magpies and think they are an unfairly maligned bird species.
When I was a kid a magpie built a nest in the tree in our garden that turned out to be unstable. All four babies fell out. The two smallest ones died from the fall but two survived. We handled them with gloves and put them up in the tree in a kind of basket for a while to try and get the mother's attention, but she did not return. So we raised them. They were so cute...
 

mccardey

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I love magpies and think they are an unfairly maligned bird species.
When I was a kid a magpie built a nest in the tree in our garden that turned out to be unstable. All four babies fell out. The two smallest ones died from the fall but two survived. We handled them with gloves and put them up in the tree in a kind of basket for a while to try and get the mother's attention, but she did not return. So we raised them. They were so cute...
How lovely :)
 

Sonya Heaney

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Years ago I made the mistake of feeding ONE magpie in my back garden. The next day the entire family turned up at my back door, knocking with their beaks and singing as loudly as they could until I fed them. A few years on and they come every day for a snack, and every spring they bring their babies to meet us.
At least they'll never swoop me, but the couple of times they've sneaked into the house have not been good experiences...!!
 

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I know your magpies are different from the ones we have in Central CA, which are an attractive and unique species that is in decline thanks to West Nile virus. US (and European) magpie species are corvids, whereas yours are related to butcherbirds. But Australian magpies are handsome, intelligent birds with amazing songs (kind of like our mockingbirds).

Animals don't sit around thinking how to mess with us--they simply struggle to survive in a world we're screwing up. Seems like they can't win. Critters that adapt to human modifications of the environment get labeled as pests.
 
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