You can spot him from a distance thanks to a wing feather that’s been permanently set askew. His trademark colouring never fully came to term and a distinct patch of mottled down asymmetrically covers him, giving him a dishevelled look. His left talon is missing the left toe leaving him with a noticeable limp. Maybe the result of being hit by a car or perhaps flying into a window - whatever the cause of the injuries, it must have been severe, because most notable of the magpie’s disfigurement was that nearly his entire beak had been crudely broken off.
He's likely to be a juvenile since he appears to be part of a family that included two parents. I take all this knowing full well I don’t know for sure any of this. His two accompanying magpies are fully developed, so I take them to be a pair. They might be older siblings. Or perhaps they're a same-sex pairing who’ve adopted this disabled child magpie. Either way, magpies rely on territorial family communes, not unlike a pride of lions, which requires a sophisticated level of communication to maintain. They do this with an extremely wide variety of sophisticated song calls. Perhaps most distinctly, their quick, expressive coos. It's a song that when heard for the first time, stands out.
He might be a she, and she might be an adult who hasn’t been able to shed that last bit of down since it’s out of reach of her stub of a beak. What I have garnered from the internet is that the magpie’s injury must be old since the beak is not bleeding. This could have been the reason for its death - by bleeding out. It is known that birds can survive after breaking their beaks since they have the ability to heal just like our bones, but only if the bleeding subsides before it’s too late.
Magpies are a distant cousin of the crow and although many times removed, share many mannerisms, many likely due to their shared intelligence. An intelligence so profound that David Quamman argued in his essay Has Success Spoiled the Crow?, it's too much for their purported station in life. This unique avian attribute may possibly account for this individual’s survival without its most important tool. As if you were to lose both your thumbs, a significant amount of problem solving must go into many, mundane, daily tasks. Magpies are omnivores but mainly eat insects they pluck from the ground. I spot the adult caregivers doing just this in the early morning, when the ground is damp. Our disabled friend never seems to feed alongside but I voyeuristically watch him pluck from wind-blown debris at the base of a fence. Bits of flowers and leaves and such, possibly hide delicious insects easily found with a bit of rummaging though the detritus.
The accident though, must have been traumatic. And did our magpie suffer long? Magpie groups will assess an injured member after and accident and decide one is too far gone. If so, they have the foresight, and the grim task, to put it out of its misery. Evidently, our friend was found worthy of survival.
When such a trauma occurs to a thrush, wren, sparrow, bowerbird, honeyeater, tern, oystercatcher, gull, spinebill, or any, many other bird species, only suffering, and a slow death will generally occur. But with a cranial capacity for problem-solving, paired with a stoic stubbornness for survival, and a social network that encourages teamwork, such an individual live on.
My documentation of this particular magpie ended when my work at the site completed, and I would not know if it would continue to live a full life. I like to think that it had lived a more satisfied life by that time, than its contemporaries, since I believe it once looked death in the eye, and told it in its distinct, cooing voice "not yet".
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