Magpies are us, but with wings

It must be spring. The magpies are under attack for attacking us. No newspaper editor can leave home without copping a letter in the back of the neck. Those letters propose two divergent courses of action. One is to forgive the magpies. The other is to trap, shoot, poison and cudgel them all the way unto extermination. There is no middle ground.

We like our birds here. They’re our signature fauna. No-one else has got them and we haven’t got much else.

But among birds we practise apartheid. We distinguish between birds that are – and here’s an adjective that chinks like a gold coin – native, and those that are not. Native birds are first-class citizens who can do no wrong. The rest are the rest and the magpie is among them. It’s an Australian import, loud, boorish, a bird to deride.

To illustrate the difference, consider the ka¯ ka¯ po¯ . Flightless and gormless, ka¯ ka¯ po¯ are now incapable of surviving without wrap-around social services. When one tried to mate with a visiting English comedian we thought it endearing. If a magpie had tried the some trick we’d have done it for attempted rape.

But it seems unfair to call magpies Australian. A few dozen were brought here against their will in the 1860s, set free and left to make a go of things. Ka¯ ka¯ po¯ would have fainted on the spot. The magpies went to it. Reproducing annually, they’ve now been here for 150 generations, which in evolutionary terms is more than twice as long as human beings. What do they have to do to become native? How do they get to be tangata whenua? And how fair is it to trap, shoot, bludgeon or poison a bird because its 150-times-great grandfather drank Foster’s, pronounced school skewl and had a penchant for cheating at cricket? We are all of us mongrels from somewhere or other and none of us responsible for our forebears.

So indigenous have magpies become that when Denis Glover sought an emblem of this landscape he evoked them. ‘‘Quardle oodle ardle woodle doodle,’’ said his magpies to everything under the sun. They still do.

I’ve got magpies, though it would be just as accurate to say they’ve got me. As in Glover’s poem they live in the old man pines that tower above my house. From there they lord it over the valley.

A hawk often circles here, riding the thermals, scanning the land with eyes of unimaginable acuity. It’s an Australasian harrier, and the ‘as’ in Australasian renders it native, gives it privileged status.

The magpies don’t care. They set off in squadron from the pines, rowing the air with fierce stubby wings, intuitively making threedimensional computations of interception. The hawk has talons, a beak and twice their bulk but they mob it, bully it, drive it off over the ridge and out of the valley. They do the same to gulls and passing geese. Magpies are as ruthlessly selfinterested as, well, we are.

Like us they’re immigrants, and like us they’ve made a home here. Like us, they consider their own kind first. Like us they attack any threats to their wellbeing. Admittedly they haven’t felled forests or drained swamps or dammed rivers, and though they’ve driven hawks into the next valley they haven’t driven whole species into extinction or into tiny enclaves ringed with fences, but the difference is one of scale not of intent. Magpies are us.

In the light of which it would hypocritical to condemn them for attacking us. But it would be equally hypocritical not to attack them back.

Hence the two types of letter every spring. They’re both right.