Do magpies like shiny objects after all?

Recent personal observations seem to confirm folklore

Reportage often renounces the folklore of this feathered friend.

Like any other small child growing up in England, the first thing I learnt about magpies was that they were attracted to anything bright and shiny and would take it to their nest. However in recent years there have been some studies which are apparently disprove this notion, so I decided to test this myself. The results were quite surprising.

Earlier this year I set up a camera trap in my garden to see what kind of local wildlife were visiting, I carefully recorded all observations onto a spreadsheet so I could use some kind of basic statistical analysis. I saw mammals such as cats foxes badgers and squirrels and a wide range of birds from robins and ravens to blackbirds and buzzards, including magpies. I found my camera was visited by magpies on 6 of the 30 days that my track was open, with each instance being a single bird.

In my previous study I had baited the track by placing kitchen scraps in front of it, typically discarded rice and chicken bones &c. in order to learn about these birds and their attraction to shiny objects I decided to set up the camera crap identical to before only this time of placing the food scraps upon a sheet of aluminium foil. The idea was simple: if the birds had no particular opinion off shiny foil then the frequency of their visits would be more or less identical to my previous observations, if they were scared of shiny objects I would see fewer visits and if I recall the are significantly greater number of visits from these birds then eat could possibly indicate that they are attracted to shiny things after all.

My curiosity got the better of me after three days so I went down to change the card in my camera. To my surprise the camera had been visited almost exclusively by magpies during this period of time. What's more, it was typically by multiple birds and on one occasion there were five magpies around the camera and its shiny bait. You can see this in the video below.

Five for silver, quite literally.

I don't wish to jump to conclusions; one must bear in mind that any ideas gained from such a small data set must be taken with an appropriately large pinch of salt. Furthermore, we must also consider there may be other reasons which could account for the presence of these birds. The best thing to do obviously be to get more data, running of this experiment again to see if the results are replicated. If there is anyone out there with a trail camera (or just too much time on their hands!), Why don't you have a go at these kind of experiment of yourself? It'd be cool to share our results on Steemit