Source: news.nationalpost.com --- Thursday, September 15, 2016
There are the snakes, the sharks and the spiders, but no one told you about the magpies, did they? In September and October, Australians band together as if motivated by a national war effort. It’s swooping season for the native magpie. This black-and-white bird with beady red-brown eyes can become aggressive, dive bombing and pecking anything, especially humans, that it deems a threat to its chicks. During the spring swooping season, victims of attacks update online maps with nest locations in order to warn others of the danger from above. Wikipedia A magpie swoops down on a girl riding a bike Principals put their bodies on the line to protect students. Talk radio shows are flooded with dramatic swoop stories. “It is the biggest urban wildlife problem there is in Australia just because of the scale and sheer number of animals involved,” said professor Darryl Jones, an urban ecologist with Griffith University in Brisbane. He has studied the troubled relationship between magpies and humans for 20 years. Australians have developed some odd defence methods over the years. When heading into a swoop zone, generations of schoolchildren (including this reporter) wore empty, plastic ice cream buckets as hats with crude eyes drawn on. The theory: a magpie won’t attack if it thinks it is being watched, and if it does, you have the ice cream bucket to protect you. Other methods include waving a stick in the air or opening an umbrella. Durin ...
from Australia http://ift.tt/2chDaRG
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