Magpies, like most corvidae, bask in an intellectual prowess not readily endowed upon fauna in general… moving around with a professional grump, undeterred by mirrors, audacious enough to ruminate on reflections rather… putting two and two together if need be, humouring the human for easy morsels… yet all that lives must have some folly, and thus they’re purported to fall for all that glitters, although science continues to refute the folklore… and the magpies march on… to higher echelons of conscious thought…
The yellow-billed blue magpie, unlike many of its brethren, is rather demure, loath to flaunt the colourful plumage… preferring to remain tucked away in arboreal abodes, its long tail feels like a lilting note in the melody of the forest, leaving behind a rustle of leaves as it glides between branches, a flight that is rather laborious… not a very fussy eater, too, making do with whatever the canopy has to offer… among all the magpies with their sharp beaks, shrill caws and stern gazes, this is one that errs on the side of humility…
I saw a pair at the periphery of a thick patch of oak and rhododendron… one was busy tending to its clutch of eggs, thereby rendering itself immune to photographic intrusions, while the other one wandered around, plucking insects from the lichen carpeting the trees, at times also daring to hopping awkwardly across the open ground, maybe looking for some extra nutrition, for parenting is a demanding ritual, no matter the species…
Their curiosity and intelligence lends them myriad attributes across cultures… from bearers of (mis)fortune to harbingers of seasons, from possessing shamanic powers to being indifferent to Christian gods, from a bearer of death to feeding off carrion on the battlefield… mostly revered in the east and dreaded in the west, another corroboration of the opening lines to that Kipling ballad, and the fact that even a little bit of brain is bound to attract some bad press eventually…
Not that all this history bothered the specimen in front of me, trudging through the camping grounds in a hurry, wanting to finish off the feeding at the soonest and rush back to the nest… self-aware hence self-effacing, punctuating the dark, brooding woods with a dollop of colour…
Yellow billed blue magpie, Bir, Himachal Pradesh
