Is it just me, or are urban birds becoming increasingly aggressive?
I’m being watched. I’m being followed. Sweat beads itch my forehead. My stalker neither blinks nor flinches. He waits. That’s what he does.
I’m looking straight into the soulless black sinister eyes of the ibis. It’s an appalling abyss of newfound fearlessness and steadfast determination.
He holds my gaze. I’m not ready to give up. Not just yet. This is my favourite lunch, from my favourite cafe, in what once was my favourite place to eat it: Sydney’s botanical gardens.
He juxtaposes with the colourful blooms. He is neither pink nor orange nor green. He is pure black and a foul off-white, with rashes of inflamed red under his oversized wings. His unblinking eye is a small burnt Malteser, sans the sweetness.
It beggars belief a single person ever voted for this creature in the Guardian’s Bird of the Year poll in 2017, when, perplexingly, it came second.
When I first saw the ibis, they were just exotically ugly. Now, they’re exquisitely aggressive. On her first sighting of an ibis, my mate Michelle, who was visiting from Britain, stopped in her tracks and enquired: “What. The. FUCK. Is that?!”
Michelle and I shared a distaste for London’s “iconic” urban bird, the pigeon. A freezing London Monday morning can barely be made worse, until you see a pigeon lapping up human sick with an audacious and gluttonous glee. Vomit is clearly the lobster of the pigeon world.
This persistent ibis isn’t after vomit. It’s after my giant Moroccan couscous. It’s internally salivating at the idea of the couscous rolling down the giant slide that is its elongated beak. It arches its beak up towards me expectantly, in a shocking display of doggedness.
I charge at it, but it is outrageously nonchalant, so I slowly retreat. To my horror, it follows. The otherwise peaceful botanical gardens descend into a contained chaos, as I quicken pace and yelp at a volume I pray will not humiliate me, and a pitch that emasculates me entirely. “Gross!” I squeal.
Is it just me, or are all urban birds becoming increasingly aggressive?
Two days later, I return to Sydney’s Domain, lunch in hand. Very quickly a magpie and a noisy miner gang up on me. One squarks, the other screams; I squeal. I run at them but they’re terrifyingly fearless. They follow me to a bench 50m away. “Not again!” I mutter.
I retreat to a grim sunless food court, but here pigeons roam right up to my feet, stirring my phobia of being enclosed with something panicked and flapping.
On the steps outside, rows of seagulls stare me out, as if ready to chant in unison “Mine! Mine! Mine!”, like in Finding Nemo.Is nowhere safe from this Hitchcock-themed nightmare?
As I write, a video goes viral of a young boy on a scooter being swooped relentlessly by a magpie. You can hear his screams at first quietly, then louder as his scooter speeds down the hill, the magpie in hot pursuit. His terror is palpable.
Behavioural ecologist Dr Andrew Katsis, from Flinders University, says this video depicts an unusually strong defensive response. “Fewer than 10% will swoop, so most attacks are the work of a small but consistent minority.” The aggressive bird, he says, is usually the male in the breeding pair. “Think of him as a very protective father looking out for the safety of his children.”
Part of me feels guilty for badmouthing our feathered friends. There’s a cognitive dissonance – the nature lover in me is being hypocritical.
Birdlife Australia’s Sean Dooley stuck up for the ibis, writing: “Many people do not like the bin chickens that have the temerity to crowd into our cities. Perhaps in part there is an element of shame about what we have done to them in this reaction. The more I see of these city ibis, the more I admire their resilience and adaptability.”
Twenty years ago, you’d rarely have seen the ibis in our cities. Now, those long beaks – designed to pick out grubs and insects – are being used to scavenge last night’s kebabs from bins.
Dooley told me the aggression I perceived isn’t just my ornithophobia, but a “trend in successful urban birds becoming more bold in seeking food as they become aware of and exploit new resources as they get used to being around people more”. And that’s especially true of recent city interlopers such as the dog-swooping noisy miner and the Australian white ibis.
However, it’s lockdown that Dooley believes may have skewed my perception. “Any purported extra aggression from birds noted this year is most likely due to people noticing birds far more due to lockdown measures,” he says. “Our immediate environment has quietened down – people are less distracted by the daily rushing around and many of us are noticing what has always gone on around us for possibly the first time.”
But Prof Darryl Jones, from the school of environment and science at Griffith University, says there is evidence urban birds are losing their fear. “With all these birds, something has happened. A tiny fraction have somehow twigged and said we can make the most of this opportunity by moving into towns and breeding.”
Magpies, for example, were “once – in the bush – the shiest birds. Now they’re habituated.” You’re still far more likely to be swopped by an urban magpie than a rural one. They’re most likely to swoop cyclists or pedestrians and short people, such as kids.
As a 5 foot 5 (165cm) cyclist, this information terrifies me.
Experts agree it’s less likely to be a surge in aggression, but more that birds are realising they can access food in urban environments with few predators.
That bin chicken didn’t even need my lunch. It was pursuing it out of “boredom”, I discover. The audacity!
“Our studies show they get all the nutrition they require early in the morning on a natural diet – insects, grubs, worms, grasshoppers,” Jones says. “They’re scavenging because they’re bored. The food’s there, so they think: why not hassle for it?”
Katsis suggests I have nobody to blame but myself. “Increases in human food waste led to an increase in animals capitalising on these new food sources. We may complain about native birds in our public spaces, but they’re responding to conditions that we manufactured through habitat modification,” he says.
“They’re the plucky survivors who found a way to coexist alongside us, and I think that’s something to be admired rather than resented.”
I hang my head, both in shame and a duck for cover in a city becoming overrun with fierce feathered foes hellbent on my food.
Is nowhere safe from this Hitchcock-themed nightmare?