Magpies and Shiney Objects

This week the BBC and various other press reports that "Magpies do not steal trinkets and are positively scared of shiny objects." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-28797519

I for one know this simply is not true or at least was not true, they do or at least did like shiny things when I was a lad. When I was a child I observed Magpies nesting in a tree that I used to climb. The Magpie's nest was always full of bits of tin foil and other shiny oddments.  On one occasion I caught a Magpie trying to take or at least peeking away at a small mirror on my bedroom windowsill.

When I was a child everyone had their milk delivered to the doorstep by the milkman. A well observed habit of various birds was to peck open milk bottles to get at the cream. It was a favourite trick of Blue Tits, but on my early morning paper rounds I often saw Magpies, Starlings and Sparrows following their example.

I suspect that the Magpies associated shiny with food and tried to take that food back to the nest. Bearing in mind that the foil off chocolate and sweets might often contain traces of food and along with the milk bottle thing it is hardly surprising that an intelligent bird like a Magpie should display such behaviour.

This behaviour in Magpies was no doubt a learned rather than a natural thing and maybe due to the lack of milk bottles on doorsteps and the somewhat improved cleaning methods use in our streets, since I was a child, has been unlearned by successive generations of the birds.

The so call scientific tests with only 64 observations is such a small sample as to be insignificant. To be of any use there would need to be several thousand observations in Magpie colonies in different parts of the country, but then what would be the point. Sorry BBC, sorry DR Sheppard - Myth not busted.