270 
CROWS, JAYS, MAGPIES, ETC. 
475. Pica pica hudsonica {Sab.). Black-billed Magpie. 
Adults. — Black, varied with bronzy iridescence, except for white belly 
and wing patches; tail long and graduated ; bill and naked skin of orbital 
region black. Young: head without bronzy gloss. Length: 17.40-21.75, 
wing 7.80-8.40, tail 9.30-11.95, exposed culmen 1.15-1.42, tarsus 1.70-1.92. 
Distribution. — Resident, except perhaps in extreme northern part of 
its range, from Alaska and Hudson Bay to northern parts of Arizona and 
New Mexico; and from western Nebraska, west to eastern slopes of Sierra 
Nevada and Cascades. 
Nest. — A mud cup lined with rootlets, grass, hair, and pine needles, 
surrounded by a globular mass of coarse sticks sometimes as big as a bushel 
basket, placed usually 3 to 20 feet from the ground in willows, thorn bushes, 
bullberry bushes, small oaks, cottonwoods, and pines. Eggs: usually 7, 
grayish, heavily and evenly blotched with brown, often almost hiding the 
ground color. 
Food. — Small mammals, birds, their young and eggs, and crawfish, but 
mainly insects, including a destructive black cricket, grasshoppers, grubs, 
and larvae, together with some fruit, berries, and green leaves. 
The magpie is a feature of the landscape, whether seen in flight 
as a black air-ship with white side-wheelers and long black rudder 
moving against a background of red cliffs in the Garden of the Gods, 
or seen standing as a lay figure on a stone wall in a Mormon village. 
There is always a freedom and largeness about his proceedings. 
Sometimes he will take wing so near that you see the green gloss on 
his back, flying with even water level flight far and away till he 
becomes a black dot and disappears beyond your field of vision. His 
masterful, positive character is not lost even when he goes squacking 
about his daily business. Whatever he does or says he claims the 
attention of the neighborhood, except when he has a secret to hide, 
when he is as silent and wary as any wise parent. 
Like all great talkers the magpies are fond of company and where 
one is seen others are usually within calling distance. Their notes 
have a conversational tone and varied inflections and it seems small 
wonder that they learn to talk when kept in confinement. 
They are keen observers and eager investigators of anything new 
that does not appear dangerous. If a line of traps are set through 
the sagebrush for small rodents and marked with bits of cotton on 
bush tops, the cotton soon catches their eyes and is promptly inves¬ 
tigated. If some of the traps have caught meadow mice they are 
carried off to a convenient place, the mice eaten and the traps left — 
sometimes causing a slight unpleasantness between magpie and 
mammalogist. In cases where the birds are common they take up 
the traps so systematically that the collector has to leave his line 
unmarked or devise a method obscure enough to escape their keen 
eyes. A flock of six or eight once came to examine into the blankets 
of a naturalist sleeping on a haycock. Several of them lit on his head 
and one was so absorbed in its explorations that the awakened cob 
lector caught it in his hand. 
