86 
NATURE NOTES 
at all uncommon to see seven or eight magpies flying in a line 
across a field, or from one tree to another. 
Few truer words have been said than — 
The magpie is not a feeder nice.” 
Nothing comes amiss to him — from a small bird or snail to a 
horse’s eye. He is very fond of the latter tit-bit, and I have 
seen him, in company with several crows, making the best of his 
opportunity on a horse’s carcase before it was taken to the Zoo 
to feed the animals. They are also very partial to blood and 
bone manure yards, and there is a field near here where there is 
always a heap of this refuse, and on it the magpies and crows 
assemble like vultures. He does not refuse an egg, whether of 
a partridge or a thrush, nor does he hesitate to eat the young of 
birds and animals, especially when sickly or benumbed with the 
cold. In April I have watched a pair of magpies in the field 
in front of our house, and they would spend hours together 
■pecking about in the grass, presumably for snails, slugs, and 
wire- worms. 
Gilbert White tells us that the magpie is very destruc- 
tive to young missel-thrushes, and perhaps many will say 
for certain he was right, but of this I am sure, that one 
missel-thrush is a match for any two magpies. This I can 
testify to with certainty, as I have seen a missel-thrush times 
without number driving the afore-mentioned pair of magpies 
from the field, and this it did simply to annoy them, as I am 
almost sure it had not got a nest of its own. 1 think that if 
magpies eat the young missel-thrushes, it is when the parents 
are not at home, and that they do not beat off the parent birds as 
is asserted. If White is correct, the magpies are often paid out, 
as not unfrequently hawks and crows take a fancy to their nests 
and appropriate them for themselves. This must 'oe very annoy- 
ing, but little more so than what I saw take place quite close to 
our house some years ago. A pair of magpies — the self-same 
two — were building their nest, and had nearly completed it when 
some rooks came, and first of all by stealth, afterwards openly, 
took it away stick by stick, in spite of the remonstrances of the 
rightful owners, who bravely did battle with them, while others 
were carrying off the sticks to an adjoining rookery. The rookery 
is deserted this year, and the magpies have come back to build 
in the self-same tree — accessible to none but winged robbers. I 
have read of a male magpie coming on the scene when his wdfe 
was keeping company with another male, and so fierce was his 
onslaught on the guilty couple that they eloped, unceremoni- 
ously pursued by the irate husband, who, on finding himself 
a bachelor, tried to get on without his partner, but finding the 
duties of nidification too arduous, left the nest and the district. 
Magpies are exceedingly suspicious and wary, and a proof 
of this is given by the following, told by George de Roy. 
