Swooping season begins in Australia
THERE are t he sna kes, t he sharks and the spiders, but no one told you about the mag- pies, did they?
In September and October, Australians band together as if motivated by a war effort. It’s swooping season for the native magpie. This black-and-white bird with beady red-brown eyes can become aggressive, dive bombing and pecking anything, especially humans, that it deems a threat to its chicks.
During the spring swooping season, victims of attacks update online maps with nest locations in order to warn others of the danger from above. Principals put their bodies on the line to protect students. Talk radio shows are flooded with dramatic swoop stories.
“It is the biggest urban wildlife problem there is in Australia just because of the scale and sheer number of animals involved,” said professor Darryl Jones, an urban ecologist with Griffith University in Brisbane. He has studied the troubled relationship between magpies and humans for 20 years.
Australians have developed some odd defence methods over the years.
When heading into a swoop zone, generations of schoolchildren wore empty, plastic ice cream buckets as hats with crude eyes drawn on. The theory: a magpie won’t attack if it thinks it is being watched, and if it does, you have the ice cream bucket to protect you.
Other methods include waving a stick in the air or opening an umbrella. During the season it is common for cyclists, adults and children alike, to ride around with a forest of zip ties protruding from their helmets.
“Birds do swoop, but they don’t come anywhere near your helmet,” said Jones, who endorses the zip-tie method.
An Australian’s fear of magpies has merit. Each year a handful of attacks cause eye injuries and in some cases permanent sight loss. Cyclists fall off their bikes, breaking bones and dislocating joints.
Jones and his students recently discovered a magpie’s ability to recognise and remember human faces, occasionally singling out individuals for escalated attacks season after season. Mail carriers who buzz around on small motorbikes are hardest hit, victims of more than 200 a day, Jones said.