In an ordinary Melbourne suburb, three magpies are eating small morsels off the ground. But there’s something a little strange. One bird flicks its tongue rhythmically in and out like a lizard – though a bird’s tongue is usually tucked away, hidden from sight. After a while, something else becomes clear: the magpie is picking the food up with short, moving stumps. The magpie has no beak.
This is a scene from a video filmed by a member of the public. It demonstrates a grim truth: that there are life and death consequences of feeding our wild birds.
The Australian magpie is found across most of the country and people love them for a host of reasons. Their behaviour is interesting. They produce complex songs, play-fight, and locate grubs and worms by listening to their sounds underground. They even seem to grieve, forming parties that inspect the deceased. These charismatic birds visit our gardens and can be enticed to eat our food. And that’s where problems start.
Since the dawn of time, all over the world, people have fed wild birds. In present-day Europe, North America and Britain, it’s encouraged. The simple act of providing supplementary food generates billions of dollars in sales of feeder equipment and food. Australians are enthusiastic bird feeders too, but ours is a unique culture. We publicly frown on feeding but privately do it in spades.
The Griffith University professor of ecology Darryl Jones has researched bird feeding in Australia. He says that our de facto official stance is “all wildlife feeding is bad”. Any information about bird feeding in Australia – by environment departments, wildlife rescue groups and councils – urges us not to.
And yet, Jones estimates a staggering 30 to 50% of households are feeding birds. Millions of Australians are enthusiastically doing it. Jones wants to reach the people who feed birds (in defiance of everything they read) and give them information about how to do it properly.
Jones’s work involves studying the interaction between people and wildlife in cities. He’s an unlikely evangelist for educating people about bird feeding – an ecology academic and previously, “absolute anti-feeder”. He changed his mind, realising that the sheer numbers of people doing it had no reliable information or advice.
He says that 10 years ago, if you wanted to know anything about feeding birds – such as what to safely feed visiting magpies – you’d get a barrage of “you shouldn’t feed the birds at all”.
Jones himself began feeding birds. He believes that feeding wild birds can be calming yet exciting, “healing, connecting and illuminating”. Having birds visit us for the food we provide offers brief encounters with truly wild creatures which can be “priceless” and a chance to connect with nature. Others feed birds because they sincerely want to help nature, to compensate for what we’re doing to the environment.
On Zoom, Jones has a cheerful disposition. He talks about his work with an infectious zeal, as befits a reluctant hero to the ordinary, bird-feeding public. In his second book on feeding, Feeding the Birds at Your Table: A Guide for Australia, Jones says that most people don’t know if they’re feeding properly or not and information is lacking because of the taboo. “They’re feeding terrible things and causing all sorts of problems but they don’t realise that.”
The main issues with bird-feeding are that we give too much food, too often, on implements that are not clean. And, for magpies in particular, we give the wrong foods.
Jones wants us to think of our food as a birdy snack, not a meal. The urban bird program manager at BirdLife Australia, Holly Parsons, likens our offerings to “fast food” or “a little treat”. Birds are best served by irregular feeding to disrupt any dependence, and must be given appropriate food. For magpies, this means fortified dry dog food, crickets or mealworms. And absolutely no mince.
Mince tops the list of bird-feeding no-no’s. It’s commonly given but brings serious complications. Jones is at pains not to scare people but lets fly with a long diatribe about mince. “It’s easy, it’s cheap, it’s accessible, it’s convenient and the birds love it. The trouble is, it doesn’t have enough calcium,” he says.
In nature, magpies eat insects, worms, beetles, frogs and lizards. These are consumed whole, yielding the calcium, vitamins and minerals they need for many metabolic processes. Mince has little calcium so when magpies don’t get enough of it, they draw on their own bone reserves. This leads to brittle bones prone to breakage and softening of beaks.
In the long-term, calcium deficiency can result in metabolic bone disease, a set of conditions with symptoms including tremors, lethargy, misshapen legs and malformed beaks. It can even occur in young birds fed unsuitable food by their parents. There are records of fledgling magpies taking their first flights from the nest but breaking their legs upon landing.
If that picture isn’t ugly enough, mince is sticky and can lodge in their beaks, leading to bacterial accumulation and infection.
It’s not hard to guess what happened to the magpie with the missing beak. Wildlife rescuer Nicky Rushworth answered a call-out for the stricken bird and caught it in a trap. At East Bentleigh Vet Clinic, veterinarian Dr Martina Saeid assessed it and opted for euthanasia because a bird that’s unable to find natural food would likely starve to death, eventually. As Jones remarked: “The [beak] stumps would never be able to pull out worms from the ground.”
When asked what caused such a dramatic infirmity, Rushworth hesitates. “This is my opinion versus a proper postmortem,” she says. “But I’ve seen it before. Inappropriate feeding of wildlife is out of control. Metabolic bone disease is very typical in birds who’re being fed huge quantities of mincemeat, or bread, or rice.”
Rushworth says members of the public react angrily when she captures afflicted birds and they’re subsequently put to sleep. She informs them: “This is actually your fault. You’ve loved this bird to death.”
In the amateur video, the beakless magpie stands on a pile of rice. Its sparkling white feathers echo the blizzard of white grains. Its stumps open and close. Watching this ruined bird is shocking but Rushworth says it’s a far from uncommon sight.
Precisely what happened to this magpie will never be known. Perhaps its beak was lost to metabolic bone disease caused by improper feeding. Or perhaps it wasn’t. Jones has heard of magpies running foul of baited rat traps. The bird pecked at the food and the trap snapped shut, severing the beak. Had this trauma befallen the bird, it wasn’t recently, says Saeid, as there was no blood on the feathers and no other injuries.
Magpie beaks, says Jones, need to be hard, like bone. “They don’t have hands, they’ve only got beaks … And if that goes, they’re in serious strife.” Birds with stumps could still survive, for a time. Jones says this magpie was probably making the most of a bad lot. “If rice is available, well, that’s the only thing it can live on.”
A magpie with no beak is a terrible sight. It compels us to examine our relationships with wild creatures, which can be wonderful for us but problematic for them. This bird certainly seems to have suffered because of us. Whether from inappropriate feeding or lethal traps, the magpie ran foul of human society. At some point, a functioning bird became a cripple.
Across Australia, magpies are birds that everyone recognises. They consistently rank top three in BirdLife Australia’s popular bird counts (Birds in Backyards and the Aussie Bird Count). The magpie won Guardian Australia’s inaugural Bird of the Year in 2017, a poll voted on by nearly 150,000 readers.
Parsons says they’re popular because “magpies … both delight and terrify people. Despite their swooping behaviour during breeding season, they are amongst many people’s favourite birds.”
Parsons enjoys their distinctive warbling and endearing personalities. She says people form attachments to their local magpies and relate to them trying to make it in suburbia, “just like us”. Jones says: “These are birds you can develop a relationship with. Really.”
In Elsternwick, another trio of magpies visits computer programmer Elizabeth Crooks’ garden. She gives them mealworms and oats. Crooks did some research on carnivorous birds and says she made sure she was giving enough calcium in her offered food.
Crooks loves the birds’ calls: “They’re beautiful,” she says. “If I sleep in, they make a big ruckus until I come out and talk to them.” The birds sometimes stand and stare at her in her office. “I enjoy the fact that they look for me and I look for them.” Crooks is fascinated by the magpies. She feeds them small amounts of appropriate food, steps back and lets nature weave her spell.
Crooks says she enjoys waking up in the morning and hearing the magpies. She says the birds are calling to her: “We’re here. We’re here. We’re here.”
• Debbie Lustig is a Melbourne writer, birdwatcher and occasional wildlife rescuer
