06 Magpies - with Mandy
Photo credit: ABC News - Jon Sambell
Understand and appreciate the magpies that live around you.
This episode is all about magpies and their behaviour, with a focus on a subspecies that lives in Perth and other parts of Western Australia.
Mandy Ridley is an Avian Ecologist and Associate Professor of the School of Biological Sciences at The University of Western Australia. Mandy's research on birds began at Cambridge University in the UK, where she completed her PhD on the evolution of birds' cooperative breeding behaviours. This research involved living in the Kalahari Desert for for at least six months of the year... for ten years! She even raised her first son there. In 2012, Mandy moved to Perth and began studying Western Australian Magpies. In total, Mandy has been conducting avian research for over 24 years and she loves it!
Available on your podcast app or listen below.
Links
* Babbler Research (Mandy's website) - www.babbler-research.com
* Mandy on Twitter - @mandy_ridley
* BirdLife Australia - Australian Magpie - birdlife.org.au/bird-profiles/australian-magpie/
* Australian Magpie recording by Eddy Smith (XC747690) - xeno-canto.org
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Kirsty: I would like to acknowledge the Bunurong Boonwurrung people who are the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast is recorded. I pay my respect to Elders past and present, and extend that respect to other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people listening to this podcast.
Kirsty: Welcome to Weekend Birder. I'm Kirsty Costa, your birdwatching wingwoman - pun intended. Ornithology is the scientific study of birds. Avian ecology is the science of how birds fit into their environment in which they live and how they co-exist with other organisms. Mandy Ridley is an avian ecologist and a professor of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Western Australia, which is on Noongar country in Perth.
Mandy: Since I was nine, I had this fascination with the natural world. I used to watch a lot of documentaries and read a lot of books about animals, and I just really wanted to be involved. So when I was nine, I thought, "That's it, I'm going to be a biologist". And I was really determined that that would be my career because I just love to be outside and listening and watching. I grew up in New Zealand and in New Zealand there's not many native mammals. If you want to go out and look at animals, it's really a lot of beautiful birds in New Zealand. So my first studies were on birds and it just grew from there. I don't only do studies on birds at the moment, but yes, my main research projects are on birds. I really wanted to understand what made animals tick, why they did the things they did, why they danced around, why they sung a lot sometimes and not others. Why they interacted with some animals and not others. I just was really interested in what was going on and how it affected the other animals around them. So I took biology at school. You can only do general science at school up until about 15 years old, and after that you can specialise. So I specialised in Biology and I went to uni to do a biological degree just because I was really determined to go out there and do some research and discover things and hopefully make a difference with applying that knowledge to conservation outcomes.
Kirsty: Mandy did a PhD at Cambridge University in the UK and she researched the Arabian Babbler. This bird lives in the deserts of southern Israel. Mandy investigated how Arabian Babblers communicate and work together to raise their young. She then heard about another bird, the Pied Babbler, which lives in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa.
Mandy: When I looked into the books, hardly anything had been done on Pied Babblers, so I thought this was a wonderful opportunity to start something, to start some research and uncover some questions about cooperation. So I went down there and I spent about a year living in the desert at the research site, just getting to know the Pied Babbler and getting them to trust me. Because ultimately what I wanted to do was to be able to walk with them throughout the day and observe their daily lives and collect behavior without, I guess, interference from them being frightened of me. So it took me about a year to habituate and color mark over 12 groups and that was 20 years ago now. So it's been going ever since then. I've had a bunch of collaborators and research students working on them. There's no shortage to the number of questions we can answer on them, they're really fascinating little bird species. They breed up to four times in a summer. And summers are really, really hot in the Kalahari. So it's really fascinating how they manage to adapt to that heat and still raise their babies, even in some very severe drought conditions. And then when I moved to Australia it was kind of hard to send students over to the Kalahari as often, but I still wanted to do cooperative research and it so happens that here in Perth there are the magpies and they live in these large cooperative groups, just like the Pied Babblers. They also forage on the ground just like the Pied Babblers, which makes them really easy to observe. You can also see their rings much easier if they're on the ground all the time and the great thing about magpies is they're wonderfully interactive. They're not really afraid of humans, well, the ones that live in the urban areas aren't anyway. So it doesn't take a long period of habituation to get them used to you. So it was a beautiful, natural new study system to add to my research interests.
Kirsty: A species is a group of animals that are more like each other than they are like any other group of animals. A subspecies is a group within a species that has become physically or genetically different from the rest of the group. This might be because it lives in a different area. As I've developed my birdwatching knowledge, I've discovered that the bird world is full of species and subspecies. For example, the Australian Magpie is a species and it has nine subspecies located around the country. And Mandy's research has been focusing on a subspecies called the Western Australian Magpie, which lives in Perth.
Mandy: We can easily tell the male and female apart. I don't think it's as easy for the subspecies on the east coast, but here in Perth the male has a full white back but the female has a scalloped black and white back, so it's mostly black with white scalloping on the edges. So it's really easy to identify the sexes. However, they don't get that full established plumage until they're about 2-3 years of age. So sometimes the juveniles can be mistaken for the female. But the way to tell the juveniles and the female part is that the juveniles don't have that regular scalloping on the back, they've more just kind of got a mash up of black and white on their back. They do have a very sharp beak. You can actually age magpies by their beak a little bit, by how long it is and the colouring. The older individuals will have more white on their beak. And we use the big sometimes to I.D. individuals without having to put rings on them, because if they've had past illnesses, it does show up on their beak. They might have a kind of humpy bit on their beak or some stripes where it's been scarred. And their beak is, I think, one of their big weapons in their battle with the ravens here. They've got a much longer beaks than the raven, and they do tend to win those those neighborhood battles I guess with the raven.
Kirsty: Through their ongoing research, Mandy and her colleagues are discovering some amazing things about magpies.
Mandy: You might often see in your local park a magpie walking along, and then suddenly it will cock its head and freeze. And it's listening to what's happening under the ground. And it does sometimes do a strike. You'll see it just strike at the ground really quickly and stab at it with its beak. That's it detecting or hearing subterranean prey and then striking at it to pull it out of the ground. That beak is really effective at piercing the dirt and pulling the prey out.
Kirsty: The basis of language is a collection of sounds that are strung together to create meaning. Mandy has spent quite a lot of her career figuring out how animal groups communicate with each other and create their own language. And she's discovered that, just like us, magpies can also combine sounds together to communicate with each other.
Mandy: I guess the song is some of the most complex of any bird in the world and in Australia we have some of the most accomplished singers in all the world. And not only does it have this really complex song, but it is also a really accomplished mimic in Australia. I think we often think of the lyrebird has been this very famous mimic and David Attenborough made it famous in that documentary of the lyrebird imitating the chainsaw. But the magpies do it too. They do it quite regularly, but not all of them do it. So at the moment we're doing some research to try and discover what the point of this mimicry is. It might be kind of an advertisement of quality. If song is an indicator of your quality as a potential mate, there may be adding in these environmental noises increases that quality for you, however, some of our birds do make really unusual sounds that we don't know where they got them from. For example, one of our females mimics R2D2 (from Star Wars) very effectively and she does say a few human words as well.
Mandy: What we've done is we've collected a basic repertoire of calls from the magpies and we've looked at whether or not they combine those calls. We found that they were they had a basic repertoire of 9-10 sounds, but they were combining them together and strings of not just 2, but up to 3 sounds together. We were pretty excited by this and so we wanted to do playbacks to prove that by combining those calls together, it was creating a different meaning from just the calls alone. This is what human language is like when you combine words together into a sentence, it carries a different meaning from just the words alone. A student of mine is doing those playbacks, and although we haven't published it yet, there's good evidence that they are effectively combining these calls. It's things like alert, danger, move now, move urgently, combining them together to create a response that is different from alert by itself or move now by itself. I think it's a really exciting area because in other species they have found they combine two sounds together in the magpies we've found that they combine up to three, but also they might be combining multiple combinations of 3, which effectively looks like what we'd call a sentence in human language.
Kirsty: Holy moly! I will never listen to a magpie in the same way again! Mandy and her team have also made some incredible discoveries about other types of magpie intelligence.
Mandy: We've done quite a bit of work on magpie intelligence in animals. We call this 'cognition' and when I first started working on the magpies, I noticed that they were wonderfully interactive and really not 'neo phobic'. Now, what neo phobic means is they they don't have a fear of novel objects. So that's a real advantage for a bird living in an urban setting, because it allows them to explore things that they might not usually see - rubbish and things that people leave out - and that allows them to exploit new food sources. When I noticed this about the magpies, I thought it would be really great to test an idea on them. It's called the 'social intelligence idea' and it basically suggests that when you are living with others and there's more exchange of ideas so you gain more information (more intelligence). I decided to test this on the magpies - not me, but my research group. So my students and I, by giving them a number of tests. For example, one of the tests is when they're presented with a block of wood, it has two wells in it. One might be dark blue and the other might be light blue. And one of them has a food reward under it and one doesn't. So if it's the dark blue, they have to remember to always pick the dark blue well and not the light blue well. How quickly they figure that out is a measure of their cognition. Other tests that we've done on them is to put food behind a transparent barrier, and they have to not peck straight at the food through the barrier, but detour around the edge. We measure the number of trials it takes for them to do this. We do it to magpies in the wild. We just put down the tray and step back and it's their choice to interact with it or not. And so we did this on our magpie population and we did it to each adult. In total, we got about 80 adults in our population doing these tests and we found a really exciting trend. Not only was there big variation and their ability to solve the tasks (some were really good at solving them and some were really not good), but there was a nice trend that the bigger the group you were in the better you were at solving the tasks. The faster you solve a task is basically a measure of your intelligence and so those in bigger groups we found were more intelligent than those in smaller groups. It fit this social intelligence idea that has been in biology for a number of years, and we were one of the first to prove it in a wild animal. So it was really exciting.
Kirsty: One of the reasons that so many Aussies know about magpies is because they can thrive in urban environments - that is, towns, cities and suburbs.
Mandy: The parklands, the beautifully irrigated parklands that stay nice and green all year round, are very nice for the magpies because it keeps the soil soft and it allows them to probe into their soil with their bill. The forested areas, they're really not good magpie territory. Once you get into bushland, you're not going to see as many magpies as if you were out and nice open areas, particularly green areas. They don't like it too swampy for sure. Just nice, well drained, fertile green parks is their ideal place. Not all magpies swoop. It tends to be the males that swoop and they only swoop when they're breeding. Mostly when there's nestlings in the nest is when they swoop. The main reason they're swooping is because they feel like there's a risk to their young and they're warning that point of risk, "Stay away from my young!". It's just a way of getting a perceived predator away from the area by approaching them with a threat. In our population, most of the magpies do not swoop because they know us. They've seen us every year for many years and they know that we don't try and get they're young, but it's just a basic parental care behaviour, "I feel like my babies are threatened. I want to let you know I'm here, go away". Our research has shown that they can recognise human voices. Because we see them regularly, they know our voices but they don't know the voices of just anybody that wanders into the park. I think this is a useful attribute to have to separate those that are friendly to you from those that might not be. We did a little experiment where we played back our voices (which were familiar to them) and strange voices, and we videoed their response and we found that they were less likely to show vigilant or alert behaviours to us than to strangers. Not only can they recognise each other but they can recognise familiar and unfamiliar humans, which is very useful for an urban living bird. I mean, as silly as that sounds, this is a highly vocal species that uses vocal communication regularly. Doing something, like, when you say in the park, "Good morning, magpies!" - they know this is going to be information they retain.
Kirsty: Magpies are sensitive to hot weather and their survival is being affected by climate change. But the good news is that there are things that you can do to help them stay healthy, especially during summer.
Mandy: The best thing you can do for your local magpies is to leave out some water for them. Now, not a deep amount of water because that could lead to drowning. Just shallow dishes of water is really of huge benefit to magpies to allow them to cool down on these very hot days. Shade is really crucial to a lot of our wildlife and indeed some of our research was looking at the heterogeneity of different territories and those areas where they can seek refuge and shade is really important to them on hot days. Backyards that are established have a good amount of shade and soils that aren't dry so that the magpies can dig into them is vital because they really need that natural invertebrate food rather than provision food like meat or cheese from humans. They really need to get those invertebrates from the ground. That's the nutrients that they need and the nutrients that their babies need. The best thing is a well irrigated garden with a lot of shade and some water available for them.
Kirsty: Mandy has been birdwatching for over three decades and the main advice that she wants to give us, fellow birdwatchers, is that we need to remember to be patient.
Mandy: Animals respond so much better to you if you just sit quietly for a while and listen and observe. If you're moving around too much, they won't come as close to you and are less likely to do their displays (be it vocal or visual). For them, they're living in an environment where you're a potential predator. If they get to know that you're not just by you sitting still and watching, fascinating things start to unfold in front of you. I guess for me, it's like watching a little TV drama every day. They all have their own personalities. There's some magpies that are incredibly bold, some that are really cheeky and playful and some that are just over it - they can't be bothered interacting with the others in the group, they just want to go and rest. So for me, every day it's just the joy of watching their personalities play out and how they look after each other and tolerate each other. I think it's endlessly entertaining.
Kirsty: I am so grateful that Mandy took the time to share what she knows with us. Her passion for research birds and animal intelligence is infectious. You can find out more about magpies by visiting weekendbirder.com and checking out the links for this episode. If you've got a minute, help us out by subscribing to this podcast and leaving a review so that other people can get into birdwatching too.
