July 17, 2008
Yesterday, I attended a site meeting for a housing project I’m involved with on the Gold Coast. After a tour of the construction site, I was crossing a park to go to my car, when all of the sudden, I heard a flapping noise behind my ear.
I instinctively turned towards the sound, and was struck broadside on my right temple by a high-velocity projectile. For an instant, I thought I’d been hit by a basketball, such was the force of the blow, but then I felt a trickle of blood down my temple accompanied by a sharp pain.
I immediately looked around to find the perpetrator of the assault. It was then I noticed my black and white clad attacker…
It was a motherfucking magpie.
Here’s a photo of one at his recent booksigning:
In Australia, many of us have childhood memories of aggressive magpies. Indeed, I discovered a national survey that found 90 per cent of males and 72 per cent of females have been attacked by a magpie at some time in their life.
Magpie attacks are mostly just a pre-emptive defense strategy whereby the magpie is simply protecting its nest. However, as with humans, some are simply assholes.
In some areas, over-aggressive “rogue” magpies are trapped and removed. However, removing the father can affect the survival of the chicks as the male is the main food provider, while the mother tends the nest. As such many neighbourhoods are extremely protective of their local magpies. Indeed, there are signs in a lot of neighbourhoods, preaching “Preserve Your Local Magpie”…
Preserve them in a pickle jar I say… but nooooo… magpies are a protected native species in Australia, so it is illegal to kill or harm them…
I know… what a gyp…
Look, to be fair, for ten months of the year, I don’t mind them. They do have charming singing voices. But during breeding season they can be a right pest, so much so that signs are often erected in parks where magpies frequently nest.
As it turns out, magpies usually don’t make heavy contact, however they have occasionally been known to attack the eyes. Most often they turn away just before impact with a clack of their beak as a warning. As it happened, I heard my attacker coming a moment before impact, and turned into his path, causing him to plough into my temple with his beak open. Hence I have two little crescent-shaped puncture wounds on my temple, which went in as deep as my skull.
Indeed I half expected him to be stuck there on impact, Wiley Coyote style, with a comical “Sproy-oy-oy-oy-ing!” sound…
But to give you an idea on what I had to contend with, here’s a nifty video of a magpie attack filmed by a cyclist wearing a camera in the back of his helmet.
So now you know more than you wanted to know about magpies. However, in closing, I think it is important to highlight the truly calamatous and disruptive nature of these scourges of the ornithological world:
Yup… I rest my case…
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General Stick Takes |
I have a bit of my left ear missing from a magpie attack when I was 16. kill them all i say…
Comment by Jonny — July 21, 2008 @ 8:02 pm