One for sorrow

Magpies. Let’s talk about magpies.

Mrs Nunn has always hated magpies. She knows that they steal and eat baby birds from local nests, and will eccentrically chase the black and white feathered ruffians from her garden at any opportunity. Having said this, she also lobs stones at the neighbour’s cat, with the infuriated words, “Sod off you tabby bastard!”

So perhaps Mrs Nunn isn’t the best judge of magpie sanity.

I read up on magpies. They sound brilliant. Not only are they an attractive looking bird (look closely and you’ll see their feathers gleam blue-green in the light), but they are highly intelligent. There are stories about magpies working together to lift an injured magpie from the road where it had been hit by a car.

Like crows and ravens, they can imitate, so could reproduce your telephone ringtone, or, like Gerald Durrell’s pet magpies in My Family and Other Animals¸ confuse the family pets by calling the dogs in their master’s voice.

They mate for life. And of course it isn’t fair to blame them for the hunting instinct that’s in their nature, any more than it’s fair to blame cats for catching mice, bees for collecting pollen or Gordon Brown for having a face like a cow’s fart.

However…

The last few days have been very warm and we’ve slept with the window open just enough to get a breeze, but not enough to tempt the cat to commit suicide. And we’ve both been woken at four o’clock every morning, unfailingly by a bastard magpie sitting in the tree next to the bedroom window.

You’d think that with the vocal ability attributed to them, the magpie might have a nice song. Indeed, if it put a bit of work into it, it might even manage to tweet a bit of Beethoven, or at the very least, Westlife. But no. Ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack, it goes. Constantly. Like a football racket on acid.

Yesterday morning, after listening to its incessant twattage for a full two hours, I got up and threw a stone at it. It’s hard to find a stone in a one-bedroom second floor flat, but I managed it. It flew away.

This morning at 4.02 I couldn’t get a line of sight to it. I banged on the window a bit, but it just acked a bit more at me. Then I noticed a neighbour’s cat in the tree, and thought that I probably wasn’t making a brilliant impression on the neighbours as it was; standing half-naked in front of my windows, throwing stones at a tree, so thought I probably ought to leave it, hope the cat ate it, and go back to bed.

No-one has seen the cat since.

If anyone knows a way to outsmart a magpie, please let me know. The best I can come up with is calling the council to chop the tree down.