Magpie: Australia's Most Recognisable (and Most Feared) Backyard Bird
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Every spring, the same headlines appear: magpie swooping season is back. It's a strange kind of fame for one of Australia's best-known birds — equal parts beloved and feared, depending entirely on the time of year.
I wanted this calendar to show the other eleven months. Away from swooping season, magpies are some of the most striking and intelligent birds in any Australian backyard. That sharp black-and-white plumage is deceptively hard to photograph well — get the white overexposed and you lose all the detail; get it right and the contrast is almost graphic in its boldness.
Magpies are also remarkably social and vocal, with a warbling call that's completely different from anything else in the yard. I've spent mornings watching family groups work methodically across a lawn, probing for insects, keeping a loose formation, occasionally breaking into that rich, melodic warble that carries much further than you'd expect from a bird just going about its business.
Photographing Magpies at Jells Park
I've photographed magpies at Jells Park in Wheelers Hill, one of my favourite places in Melbourne for photographing Australian birds. The open grassy areas around the lake are ideal for watching them forage, and early morning light makes that black-and-white contrast far easier to handle than harsh midday sun. If you're heading there for Jells Park photos in spring, keep an eye out — swooping season applies in parks too.
You can read more about the park, and the other birds I photograph there, in My Favourite Places: Jells Park, Wheelers Hill.
They're also famously recognised as one of the most intelligent birds in the world — capable of recognising individual human faces and remembering them for years. That's part of what makes them worth a whole calendar: they're not just a familiar sight, they're a genuinely remarkable one.
The Magpies Wall Calendar is personalised to order and makes a great gift for anyone who's ever had a slightly complicated relationship with the magpie in their street — respect and caution in equal measure.
