Bird Profile

Black-billed Magpie

A half-metre of black, white and iridescent green that walks across your lawn like it owns the deed. Magpies divide western yards more sharply than any other bird.

The Black-billed Magpie (Pica hudsonia) is a big, long-tailed corvid of open country in the interior West: sagebrush, ranchland, river bottoms, town edges, campgrounds and the parking lots of every trailhead in Montana. From a distance it reads as a black and white bird. Close up, in sun, the wings and tail throw green, blue and purple iridescence that no photograph quite captures.

Magpies are conspicuous, noisy, tame around people and utterly unbothered by being disliked. They walk rather than hop when crossing open ground, they raid other birds' nests, they clean up roadkill, and they build the most elaborate nest of any North American songbird.

For a feeder owner in the West the practical questions are narrow: can you feed magpies without handing over the whole yard, and can you stop them if you would rather not. Both answers come down to what surfaces you offer, because a magpie cannot use most feeders and gets nearly everything it takes from the ground or an open tray.

How to identify a Black-billed Magpie#

There is essentially nothing else like it in its range. The head, breast, back and tail are black, the belly and shoulder patches white, and the primaries show large white panels that flash in flight. The bill and legs are black. The tail is enormously long and tapered, and the bird trails it behind in a slow, undulating flight that looks like it takes effort.

Sexes look alike, though males average slightly larger with longer tails. Juveniles have shorter tails and duller iridescence, and in midsummer a family group of short-tailed young following a long-tailed adult confuses people every year.

The only genuine confusion risk is with the Yellow-billed Magpie, and geography settles it. Yellow-billed Magpies live in California's Central Valley and nearby foothills and nowhere else on earth. Black-billed Magpies are almost entirely absent from that area.

The two American magpies were long lumped with the Eurasian Magpie. Black-billed Magpie was recognized as a separate species in 2000, largely on the strength of vocal and genetic differences. A magpie you saw in Europe is a different bird.

Where you will see them#

Black-billed Magpies occupy the interior West and northern Great Plains: from south-central Alaska and the Yukon south through the prairie provinces, the Mountain West and the western Great Plains, reaching northern Arizona and New Mexico. They are scarce west of the Cascades and effectively absent from the East, so an eastern magpie sighting is almost always a starling, a mockingbird or a bird that escaped from somewhere.

They are resident year round and do not migrate, though mountain birds may drift downslope in hard winters. Their preferred habitat is open ground with scattered trees and shrubs, especially river corridors, shelterbelts and the ragged edges of towns. Dense forest and treeless plains both hold few magpies.

Magpie numbers respond quickly to human food. Campgrounds, feedlots, dumpsters and horse paddocks all support more magpies than the surrounding country does, which is worth remembering before you decide the birds in your yard arrived by accident.

Winter behavior is worth watching for. Magpies gather in loose groups in cold weather and roost communally in dense trees and shrubs, sometimes dozens together, then disperse to forage during the day. Pairs are otherwise long-term and territorial, and courtship displays around a nest site can begin surprisingly early in the year, well before the snow has gone.

What magpies eat#

Magpies are omnivores with a strong pull toward animal food. Insects make up a large share of the warm-season diet: grasshoppers, beetles, caterpillars and fly larvae, often taken by walking through short grass and flipping over dung and debris. They also take carrion, eggs and nestlings, small mammals, grain, fruit and human food waste.

The best-known behavior is picking ticks and other parasites off large mammals. Magpies land on the backs of deer, elk, moose and cattle and work through the hair for engorged ticks. This is genuinely useful to the animal, but magpies will also peck at existing sores, which is where a century of ranchers' hostility comes from.

Like other corvids they cache food, though in a scattered short-term way rather than the industrial scale of a Clark's Nutcracker or the acorn hoarding of a Blue Jay. A magpie that takes suet from your feeder and disappears into the shrubbery is usually hiding it, not eating it.

Magpies at the feeder#

A magpie is far too big for a tube feeder and cannot fit through a caged feeder grid. It gets what it gets from open trays, the ground, and suet cages it can hang on to. That gives you clean control in both directions.

Ground spill matters more here than most people expect. Magpies work the ground under feeders as their default foraging strategy, so a no-mess blend or a seed catcher does most of the management work by itself, along with cutting down on the seed mess that draws rodents.

The nest is the most impressive thing they build#

A magpie nest is a domed fortress of sticks, roughly the size of a beach ball, with a mud cup inside lined with grass and hair and one or two side entrances under the stick canopy. Pairs may work on it for over a month, and old nests persist in trees for years.

Clutches are usually 6 or 7 eggs, sometimes fewer or more. The female incubates for about 18 days and the young leave the nest at roughly 4 weeks, staying with the adults for weeks afterward. One brood per year is normal.

Magpies also mob predators loudly and persistently. A racket of harsh chattering from a group of magpies usually means a cat, a fox or a raptor, which makes them a useful early warning for a hawk hunting your feeder or for the neighborhood cat that you can address through keeping cats and birds apart.

Voice, gatherings and how smart they are#

The common call is a rising, questioning mag mag mag or a harsh rapid chatter. Magpies also produce a wide range of quieter squeaks, whistles and mimicked sounds when relaxed, which most people never hear because the bird stops when you approach.

Magpies gather noisily around a dead magpie, a behavior sometimes described as a funeral. What that behavior means is not settled. Researchers who study corvid responses to dead conspecifics generally interpret it as learning about danger rather than mourning, and the evidence for anything more is thin.

Eurasian Magpies have passed mark tests suggesting mirror self-recognition, which is often quoted about American magpies too. That work was done on the European species, and it is fairer to say that magpies belong to a family of unusually capable birds than to claim the specific result for Black-billed Magpies.

Persecution, protection and West Nile virus#

For much of the twentieth century magpies were bountied, shot and poisoned across the West on the grounds that they harmed livestock and game birds. Large numbers also died as bycatch from poisoned baits set for coyotes. The campaigns did not reduce the population in any lasting way.

West Nile virus, which arrived in North America in 1999, hit magpies hard, as it did American Crows and other corvids. Black-billed Magpies declined in affected areas in the early 2000s. The California endemic Yellow-billed Magpie suffered severe losses and is a species of ongoing conservation concern.

Feeder hygiene will not affect a mosquito-borne virus, but magpies use open trays and ground, the two dirtiest feeding surfaces. Scrub trays and dry them weekly using the method in how to clean a bird feeder, and never leave wet seed sitting out.

Living with magpies#

• Pick a side. A yard that offers both suet on an open cage and a swept, tube-only seed station will get magpies at the suet and nothing else, which is usually the outcome people want.
• Keep meat scraps and pet food indoors. Both create dependent, bold birds and attract raccoons and rodents as well.
• Give small birds cover. A brush pile within 10 to 15 feet (3 to 4.5 m) of the feeders lets chickadees and finches carry on while magpies work the ground.
• Expect nest raiding in June, and expect to hear about it. It is a small share of the magpie diet and not a threat to your local songbird population.
• Watch them properly once. A magpie in low winter sun is one of the best-looking birds in North America, which is easy to forget when it is standing in your tray.