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Magpie - anything I can do ? (2 Viewers)

artdancelove said:
Is there really no way at all to chase magpies away?

Ernest

Not really. They're territorial, where you expect them to go? Shoot them, and another will pop up in a few days. Unless you do it over a very wide area (eg regional) and, like, forever.

You can protect nests to some point by putting a chekenwire screen around them or the area of the bush they're nesting in, but leaving enough space for the adults to get in and out, but it's a long shot and may be counterproductive.

Remember, it only needs 2 blackbirds out of every pair and all the young they will raise that year to survive til the next spring for the population to remain stable. That means that the average family will have to lose about 10-15 individuals a year to keep the status quo. If every one survived, or even half, or any more than c.10-20%, then we'd soon be knee-deep in blackbirds.
 
I have built a Larson Trap and it is set permanently in my garden. Until I built the trap for years no eggs or chicks survived, against nature or not, this is the best way I know to give the birds a chance to rear their young breed in peace.
 
Rubyred said:
I have built a Larson Trap and it is set permanently in my garden. Until I built the trap for years no eggs or chicks survived, against nature or not, this is the best way I know to give the birds a chance to rear their young breed in peace.

So how long between catches? How long doe sit take for your magpie to be replaced? Because there is a floating population that fill in gaps such as the ones you create so, effectively, you're going to have to keep this up for perpetuity and all so that you can create punctuated small windows when a magpie isn't present before the next one arrives. It's simply pointless. The only way to stop other magpies arriving is to have a magpie resident.

You say that "no eggs or chicks survived", but how can you possibly know that? Do you seach *and find* all nests in your magpies' territory? Do you monitor all nest failures and know for sure that it was a magpie, and not a cat/mouse/squirrel/boy etc? Or are you just assuming that from seeing several obvious nests fail (that were simple enough for even a human to find)?
 
My breeding magpies do a grand job of chasing the squirrels and cats off. They also take a dim view of Carrion Crows You will find that European songbirds have evolved alongside Magpies (unlike grey squirrels) and the ones with the better survival adaptation manage to get enough young off to maintain the population.
 
Poecile said:
Remember, it only needs 2 blackbirds out of every pair and all the young they will raise that year to survive til the next spring for the population to remain stable. That means that the average family will have to lose about 10-15 individuals a year to keep the status quo. If every one survived, or even half, or any more than c.10-20%, then we'd soon be knee-deep in blackbirds.

More like there would be more lingering deaths down to starvation in the winter! Food supply is the controlling factor of Blackbirds!
 
Magpies are great. So they eat a few bird chicks... They're much prettier and more interesting than Blackbirds – and have you ever heard their subdued song? They do pretty badly in the Netherlands away from towns because they get chased off by Carrion Crows and killed by Goshawks.

If you want to chase them away (which of course I can imagine), try hanging out pieces of aluminium foil near the nest. It worked well to protect the blackbirds in my mother's garden, of which an earlier brood was predated by Jackdaws.
 
Poecile said:
So you think suburban gardens with bird table and nestboxes, or farmland and hedgerows and little copses, are 'natural' then, do you? .

Erm, no - I didn't say that. My point was that people were saying that letting a magpie take a blackbird in your garden is 'nature' - I was pointing out that the current level of magpies is not necessarily 'natural', and *may* be becasue they have adapted well to the changes man has made to the environment. I was thinking here particularly about the availablility of carrion from road kill, and the general wastefulness which leaves edible foodstuffs around. Of course man's counter measure to this (shooting the poor little buggers) may have tipped the balance the other way, so maybe my supposition was wrong.

I also pointed out that the bb's living in an urban environment, & chosing to nest in leylandii is unnatural - these trees are notoriously rubbish for providing protection to nesting birds. Many of the denser-foliaged native trees & shrubs they may otherwise have chosen have been removed by man.

You point out that blackbird numbers are higher in this unnatural environment than the pre-human one. Fair enough, but I hadn't actually said otherwise (although I did assume it |;| - I hadn't realised that dense woodland is less suitable for bb's than partly wooded 'marginal' areas.)

I don't think my actions are 'natural', and have never claimed they are - but that doesn't make them bad in my book, or no more so than the RSPB 'controlling' gulls or foxes to favour other species.


Poecile said:
not many martens, polecats, weasels, snakes, stoats, mink, mice, jays, woodpeckers etc in your neck of the woods, I imagine .

Actually, you'd be surprised. I've had mink in the garden (only once to my knowledge - it robbed a wood pigeon nest), mice (yep - there's at least one woodmouse nest, and I feed them through the winter, so hopefully they're a permanent fixture), jays (not too frequent - they only seem to show up in the nesting season to rob nests), woodpeckers (we get GS Woody, & greens are in the nearby woods, but don't come to the garden). No stoats in the garden, sadly, but there are definitely some within a few miles.

Poecile said:
In short, blackbird and robin numbers are also massively inflated and at a completely unnatural level. Whatever 'natural' is.

OK - I accept that, but are you saying that it's therefore wrong to try to bolster their numbers still further by providing them with unnatural food sources, nest boxes & trying to limit predation?

Adrian
 
If you are correct in your statement about Blackbird numbers being unnaturally high god only knows why they were so much higher when I was younger so were the numbers of Tree,House Sparrow,Song,Missel Thrush,Dunnock and alot of other species I must say ive never heard such nonsense in my life
 
ALAN DICKINSON said:
If you are correct in your statement about Blackbird numbers being unnaturally high god only knows why they were so much higher when I was younger so were the numbers of Tree,House Sparrow,Song,Missel Thrush,Dunnock and alot of other species I must say ive never heard such nonsense in my life

So where do you think all these enormous numbers of birds of woodland edge lived when there was about 80%+ blanket forest cover in Britian? There is virtually no natural forest left in Britain at all, so all habitats are artificial and no birds are living in a natural state at their normal population levels. The only natural lowland forest left in Europe is Bialowieza. The density of common British birds there, such as the ones you mention, is very much lower. And that is their natural habitat. Numbers of those species were higher (or you percieved them to be) when you were a kid because the habitat was even more favourable for them then. But it was still no more 'natural' than it is today. We'd simply created a good environment for them by accident. Blackbirds, after all, had been around for several million years before they'd ever seen a hedgerow, lawn or bird table. It might seem like nonsense to you, but I'll wager that's because you're not an ecologist or an ornithologist. If you were, you'd know that that is a basic given fact. Go and look up papers by Fuller et al on Bialowieza's birds, and then compare them with densities in British habitats.
 
abagguley said:
OK - I accept that, but are you saying that it's therefore wrong to try to bolster their numbers still further by providing them with unnatural food sources, nest boxes & trying to limit predation?

Adrian

Not saying it's wrong per se, but you're being hypocritical by castigating one species (magpie) for doing exactly the same as another (blackbird), by utilising a human-influenced habitat. Neither are living in their natural habitat, they're both making the best of what's there.

Incidently, one of the reasons people that that magpies are unnaturally high at the moment is because they were heavily persecuted and eradicted for much of the previous 100 years. They were quite a scarce bird in the 1930s due to persecution, similar to the Red Kite, in fact.
 
The anount of birds that were around is not something i perceived it is a fact you are right Magpies were persecuted and still are by alot of people I wonder why? as for Grey squirrels they are classed as vermin .
 
ALAN DICKINSON said:
as for Grey squirrels they are classed as vermin .

So are bullfinches. What do you suggest we do with those then? And you haven't answered the question: where did all the teeming numbers of garden and hedgerow birds live before gardens and hedgerows existed? Seeing as we know that their numbers are naturally low in primeval forest, which blanketed this island until about 5000 years ago, where do you suggest they were hiding for the 6000 years preceding that, between the end of the ice age and deforestation?
 
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Poecile said:
So are bullfinches. What do you suggest we do with those then? And you haven't answered the question: where did all the teeming numbers of garden and hedgerow birds live before gardens and hedgerows existed? Seeing as we know that their numbers are naturally low in primeval forest, which blanketed this island until about 5000 years ago, where do you suggest they were hiding for the 6000 years preceding that, between the end of the ice age and deforestation?
If you can find a primeval forest then you are very welcome to go and live in it I dont much fancy it myself I am more interested in what is happening now I realise Bullfinches may do some damage to fruit trees but have no knowledge of them being classed as vermin in these parts.
 
Quite Happy

Poecile said:
So how long between catches? How long doe sit take for your magpie to be replaced? Because there is a floating population that fill in gaps such as the ones you create so, effectively, you're going to have to keep this up for perpetuity and all so that you can create punctuated small windows when a magpie isn't present before the next one arrives. It's simply pointless. The only way to stop other magpies arriving is to have a magpie resident.

You say that "no eggs or chicks survived", but how can you possibly know that? Do you seach *and find* all nests in your magpies' territory? Do you monitor all nest failures and know for sure that it was a magpie, and not a cat/mouse/squirrel/boy etc? Or are you just assuming that from seeing several obvious nests fail (that were simple enough for even a human to find)?
I have a small garden, not acres of land, so I can find and watch most, if not all the nests in my garden. For the first 4 years every nest I knew of, was found by Magpies, I would watch the Magpies systematically work there way along the hedge and bushes taking eggs or young. I use a Larson trap, as for me it’s the most effective way of controlling the Magpies that hunt in my garden. I now have various songbirds rearing young, which has never happened for the last 4 years. The trap is set permanently so when other Magpies come into my garden they do not last long! So you can have a garden without songbirds and admire your Magpies, I will carry on enjoying just the songbirds thank you!
 
Rubyred, do you kill the Magpies? I know they get bad press as corvids, but it's nature. They've had babies to feed as well, not just the smaller birds in your garden. I've had birds nesting in the garden and had close calls with Magpies and Jays, but now I see THEM with their newly fledged chicks and are happy to see them as well as the smaller birds.
 
david2004 said:
Rubyred, do you kill the Magpies? I know they get bad press as corvids, but it's nature. They've had babies to feed as well, not just the smaller birds in your garden. I've had birds nesting in the garden and had close calls with Magpies and Jays, but now I see THEM with their newly fledged chicks and are happy to see them as well as the smaller birds.

Not all of them, you need to keep a live one in the trap.
 
Nice mentality Rubyred - now let me see, I quite like butterflies fltting about the garden, so I'll just eliminate the Spotted Flycatchers; think mice are not so bad too, so I'll get rid of the Tawny Owls. How else could I meddle in order that I create a garden that fits the image I wish to see?
 
Jos Stratford said:
Nice mentality Rubyred - now let me see, I quite like butterflies fltting about the garden, so I'll just eliminate the Spotted Flycatchers; think mice are not so bad too, so I'll get rid of the Tawny Owls. How else could I meddle in order that I create a garden that fits the image I wish to see?

Very nice, I sleep all the more soundly knowing my trap is set!
 
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