Magpies

Saw crows mobbing a heron just up the hill from us the other day. I supposed it had been after chicks. It's usually buzzards that the crows mob around here.

Lots of magpies here too. The main thing I've noticed about them, in spring in particular, is how noisy they are.

The crows in our neighbourhood also mob the local heron when it is sitting on next door's roof eyeing up the fish in our pond and I did wonder why they were bothered about it. The heron takes fish and frogs from the pond (when it eventually finds a way to circumvent my latest ingenious heron-deterrent) but I didn't realise that they also take chicks. It all makes sense now.

We get quite a few red kite around here, and beautiful birds they are,too. But last week, when driving along near Welwyn Garden City, a kite swept really low over our car and dropped a small rabbit onto the road. We don't know whether it's intention was to kill the poor little thing, or it just lost its grip on it.

We have lots of magpies round us. They are beautiful birds and they don't seem to be much trouble. We don't have sparrows but we have lots of tits, blue, coal, great and long tailed, and we have robins, blackbirds, goldfinches and chaffinches. This year we've had a couple of families of starlings for the first time. There's no sign of us losing any of them to the magpies.

A few hundred years ago red kites were considered a real nuisance - things change all the time

Trouble is magpies have adapted very well to the 21st century. Discarded food, especially from fast food takeaways, road kill, those of us who like to feed the wildlife, etc and they're not over fussy where they build their nests so loss of habitat doesn't really affect them.

So numbers on the increase accordingly.

It is always the adaptors who are the better survivors. It's how natural selection/evolution works.

Humans take heed!

Indeed! That's a thought I have often.

Baby Magpies are the cutest creatures ever. They are like a black and white boiled egg on legs

.. a shame they grow up to be like their parents