The Magpies: The Ecology and Behaviour of Black-Billed and Yellow-Billed Magpies

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Two species of magpie feature in this book, the Black-billed Magpie, familiar to most Europeans, which occurs throughout much of the northern hemisphere, and the Yellow-billed Magpie, which is confined to California.

Magpies are unmistakable in their appearance, voice and extrovert, arrogant manner. While their persecution at the hands of gamekeepers over the last hundred years has made them wary and difficult to approach, a number of recent field studies, both in Europe and North America, have successfully revealed the intricacies of the magpie way of life.

Tim Birkhead has studied both species, and has produced a fascinating account of their ecology and behaviour. Many of the results from his ten-year study of magpies in northern England are published here for the first time. Particularly revealing however is his comparison of the two species and of their different races. Magpies occur in a wide range of habitats, including English farmland, the deserts of North America, the mountains of Saudi Arabia and the windswept plateaus of Tibet. As this book explains, magpies are able to exploit this diversity of habitats largely through their remarkably flexible social behaviour.

The Magpies covers all aspects of their lives, including their marital relationships, food hoarding behaviour, longevity and survival, nesting behaviour, breeding success and their controversial relationship with man.

The text is supported by numerous photographs, diagrams and tables, and superb illustrations by David Quinn.

Author Bio

Tim Birkhead is an academic and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His professional interests span ornithology, evolution and reproductive biology, as well as the history of science. He is known for his work on both on the mating systems of birds and the history of ornithology.

Tim received the Elliot Coues Medal, for outstanding and innovative contributions to ornithological research in 2010; the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour medal for outstanding contributions to the study of animal behaviour in 2012; The Godman-Salvin Medal, for 'distinguished ornithological work' by the British Ornithologists' Union in 2016, the Founders' Medal of the Society for the Study of the History of Natural History for contributions to the history and bibliography of natural history in 2016. In 2014 Tim won the Zoological Society of Londons Silver Medal for contributions to the understanding and appreciation of Zoology. He won the Eisenmann Medal of the Linnaean Society of New York, for excellence in ornithology and encouragement of the amateur in 2015; the Stephen Jay Gould Prize, for increasing public understanding of evolutionary biology (from the Society of Evolution) in 2017; and that same year the Zoological Society of Londons Clarivate Analytics Award, for Communicating Zoology to a general audience for his book The Most Perfect Thing. Tim was elected as an FRS in 2004.

Tim has written or edited 15 books, including four popular science titles published by Bloomsbury The Wisdom of Birds (2008), Bird Sense (2012); The Most Perfect Thing (2017) and The Wonderful Mr Willughby (Bloomsbury 2018).

He is one of the four founders of New Networks for Naturean annual festival that brings together scientists, writers, poets, artists and musicians to celebrate our relationship with the natural world.