In 2007 a magpie hit the headlines when it spent a week at a storage in Rochdale snatching small gear, unfastened alternate, or even automotive keys, whilst in 2008 a platinum engagement ring was once retrieved from a magpie’s nest that had disappeared 3 years previous.
And in 2019 a lumberjack operating on the Château de Versailles found out a treasure trove of over 1,000 cash in a magpie’s nest that it had taken from the fountains within the palace gardens.
However there isn’t the abundance of news that one would be expecting a few hen with any such deficient recognition.
Checking out the speculation
In 2014 a crew of scientists from the Centre for Analysis in Animal Behaviour (CRAB) determined to analyze. To check the speculation the researchers from Exeter College positioned a pile of nuts 30cm clear of a pile of glossy pieces akin to screws, rings, and items of aluminium foil and some other pile of nuts close to a equivalent pile of glossy pieces that that they had sprayed with matte blue paint.
After keep watch over checks were performed the scientists noticed the magpies to look which items they had been maximum interested in. In 64 checks magpies best picked up a sparkly object two times. Each instances a silver ring was once picked up however instantly discarded. If truth be told, the birds have shyed away from each the glossy items and the blue items steadily exhibiting indicators of anxiety and feeding much less after they had been within reach.
The crew had been not able to search out any proof that magpies had been interested in glossy issues and the items in truth seemed to steered responses of neophobia, the concern of recent issues.
They recommended that the explanation we affiliate magpies with such kleptomania is that after they do infrequently select up glossy items we generally tend to note it extra in comparison to after they take much less fascinating issues. The parable would possibly subsequently have resulted from statement bias and the truth that after we do see a magpie stealing one thing sparkly we’re much more likely to inform other folks.
Magpies, then again, are clever birds and are in a position to subtle psychological duties akin to remembering the place they’ve hoarded meals. They’re additionally very inquisitive birds, and up to now when other people saved magpies as pets there would were many alternatives for them to take precious items.
In 1815 two French playwrights Théodore Baudouin d’Aubigny and Louis-Charles Caigniez, wrote L. a. Pie voleuse ou l. a. Servante de Palaiseau, a 3-act melodrama through which a servant is sentenced to dying for stealing silverware from her grasp. It is just later that it’s found out that the true perpetrator is his puppy magpie.
In 1817 the Italian composer Gioachino Rossini primarily based his opera L. a. gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) at the tale and this, it sort of feels, sealed the magpie’s destiny as a jewel thief.
* Do you know this aphorism is in truth a misquote? The unique, attributed to the political scientist Ray Wolfinger, was once in truth ‘the plural of anecdote is knowledge’. For some explanation why it has morphed into the exact opposite.