I have three vivid memories of being attacked by magpies.
The first was when I was about eight years old and we lived in Melbourne. One Saturday morning I went to a park to play and was almost instantly hit from behind. “But I like animals what are you attacking me for!!”, I screamed in my head to no avail. The gash was so deep it required a trip to the doctor.
The second was in 1985, some mates and I were riding our push-bikes from Toowoomba to Gladstone, and somewhere north of Crows Nest there was a deep dip in the road with a solitary tree at the bottom of it next to the road. There was four of us riding and we were spread out a little – unbeknown to us there was a magpie nest in that tree and one by one it picked each of us off. I was third from the front and could see two of my mates get hit, and then my turn rapidly approached – after hitting my friend in front of me, it arced right up into the sky behind me, cleverly with the sun at its back, then swooped down and hit me under the helmet at the back of my neck. It was actually kind of fun we all thought.
The last time was in Brisbane in the early 2000’s, and not really as much fun. I had one of our kids in a pram and walked around to visit a friend. We all knew of a dangerous magpie in the area, and I approached the house with some trepidation….but nothing happened – I was fine. With this new found confidence I decided to walk home a different way – through a park of course. It didn’t take long before I felt a disturbance behind my left shoulder, almost like someone tapping. I turned around to see what it was, and a magpie was hovering, and then bang! It got me right between the eyes. There was a moment there when I was completely exposed and it took advantage of that. Thank goodness it decided to get me right between the eyes and not in one of my eyes – which it could have easily done.
None of this has put me off birds though – and when you think about it, I, like everyone else, has probably had thousands of interactions with magpies and you can count on one hand how many of them have been negative. The threat magpies pose is grossly overstated. Less than 10% of birds swoop, it is almost always males and it is extremely rare that it happens outside of the breeding season. During the breeding season the swooping starts when the eggs are laid and being incubated, then peaks when the chicks are in the nest, and then rapidly stops after the chicks have fledged.
So why attack at all? It’s hard work being a magpie and breeding in the wild. Almost everything wants to eat your tasty eggs and chicks – including goannas, snakes, cats, kites, kookaburras, currawongs, crows….the list goes on. But not only that just getting to the stage where you can breed is a major effort – as sedentary birds magpies must establish and defend a territory from other magpies which want to usurp them. If they are unsuccessful they will be forced into wandering flocks of territory-less unmated birds with a very uncertain future.
So why bring this up now? Well the nests are starting to be built. Typically the nests are built in late July/August with eggs laid and incubated in August, hatching in September (the peak swooping period) and then the chicks fledging in October. My gut feeling is with a wet and mild winter, and the onset of a dry summer, we will have an early breeding season around the Crows Nest area.
The Toowoomba Regional Council is pretty good at putting up the warning signs for nesting and swooping birds – so if you see an aggressive birds, please contact the council so they can erect a sign, and then avoid the area, which is usually within a hundred metre radius of the nesting tree. It may be an inconvenience for you – but when you consider the life and death struggle these birds have every day just to exist and to breed, it’s the least we can do.
One final note – a lot of people feed mince meat to magpies, thinking they are being kind to them. Please, NEVER EVER do this. It contains way too much phosphorus and not enough calcium. This causes them to leach calcium from their bones and develope deformed bones and beaks. As mince is sticky it can also get stuck inside their beaks and rot and kill the birds with bacterial infections. There’s a lot working against magpies, we don’t have to add to it.
But let’s end this on a positive note – consider the beautiful warbling mellifluous call – or their mimicking abilities. One day I crossed Hume Street in town near the police station. Just as I alighted the curb I heard “beep beep” as a car was unlocked, two doors shut and then a siren start. I looked back expecting to see a police car going – nope – it was just a magpie sitting on the railing outside the station. How many times must it have heard that sound I thought.
This article first appeared in The Crows Post in August 2026