Ausgarden: Australia's Gardening Community

On the hill directly behind the cottage there once lived a family of magpies, and the parent birds had their babies each year away from the road, which was a blessing. Too many magpie babies are killed on the roads as they forage there for the insects slain by the passing traffic. These babies were chased away from the family territory each year at the end of winter when they had grown enough and known enough to allow the parents to raise another brood. The carolling of these birds each morning was one of those pleasures that can't be obtained with money and it was a joy to watch them walking over the hillside, stop, turning their head on the side, standing perfectly still, waiting. Then suddenly spearing their beak into the ground bringing it out and up into the air as gravity dropped whatever they had caught deeper into their maw; eating whatever thought it was safely hidden from their sight and hearing just under the ground surface. These quite attractive and entertaining black and white birds fought constantly with the Choughs that also came to the cottage in an attempt to discover anything they might find to feed themselves or their young. The noise of the battle, much squawking and hawking as the two families met was always larger than the fight itself which was a relief for us, as we didn't want to see either species of bird get injured. There were never any injuries, hardly a feather would fly even when a magpie would stand over a Chough, the latter laying on its back loudly and rebelliously squawking abuse at suffering such an indignity, but daring not be physical confronting in case it suffered something worse than the dent to its ego.

As time went by we planted apple trees quite close together, in kind of a spindle hedgerow on the hill described above, and as the trees grew, the magpies who enjoy rather more open forest than closed in spaces, found another area to claim as their territory. The apple trees continued to grow larger. However, as happens so often in world in constant flux, nature took a hand. There was drought after drought, and dry time after drought, and the sheep were allowed access to the apple trees which they ring barked and with this sort of abuse the trees perished and became just dried trees hanging out of the ground.

The trees were dead for hardly three years and the magpies came back and and looked for whatever was under the top layer of soil in the paddocks once more. The trees that had made the hill too closed in for them were still there but leafless and allowed the birds to detect any predator quickly and long before it could reach them. They haven't quite reclaimed this as a territory to the point where they are here all the time, but that will probably happen in the next couple of years or so we hope. I'm not certain that we haven't seen a fair trade, maybe we have lost nothing after all.