magpie visitor
30 Sep 2019 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneThanks for all the comments, everybody.
A beautiful magpie has been sitting on the gazebo roof right outside the window next to our computers during the daytime recently - every day, sometimes multiple times. It hurries away when it sees us looking at it, but it does come back and hang out there. (I wonder what it's doing though: I don't think there's food there unless it's eating apples from the tree. Seems out of character. They are omnivores though, I guess. Maybe there are a lot of slugs/snails in the hops?)
I want to encourage it to hang out and be less afraid, so I was plannning to gather some shiny presents and leave them on the gazebo roof for it. A quick websearch says leaving food for them is a bad idea because it can disrupt their regular feeding habits and the natural populations in the neighborhood and that they are mainly insectivores, and they are surely finding plenty of those already... oh no, and now another search says repeatedly that there's no evidence that corvids/magpies are attracted to shiny objects!
They use strings, wires, etc to line their nests, but these are surely built in the spring? And anecdotally they are known to steal small smooth stones...?
A beautiful magpie has been sitting on the gazebo roof right outside the window next to our computers during the daytime recently - every day, sometimes multiple times. It hurries away when it sees us looking at it, but it does come back and hang out there. (I wonder what it's doing though: I don't think there's food there unless it's eating apples from the tree. Seems out of character. They are omnivores though, I guess. Maybe there are a lot of slugs/snails in the hops?)
I want to encourage it to hang out and be less afraid, so I was plannning to gather some shiny presents and leave them on the gazebo roof for it. A quick websearch says leaving food for them is a bad idea because it can disrupt their regular feeding habits and the natural populations in the neighborhood and that they are mainly insectivores, and they are surely finding plenty of those already... oh no, and now another search says repeatedly that there's no evidence that corvids/magpies are attracted to shiny objects!
They use strings, wires, etc to line their nests, but these are surely built in the spring? And anecdotally they are known to steal small smooth stones...?
(no subject)
Date: 1 Oct 2019 08:15 am (UTC)