Beyond Borders
For the past few mornings, a magpie has greeted me at my door, flitting around on the driveway between the house and a grove of birch. Each time, I have a few seconds to watch the bird closely — his black feathers tinged with a subtle blue-green, beady, crow-like eyes scanning the ground, long plumy tail — before my dog, a pointer, takes notice and charges. The magpie flushes back into the trees, letting out a brassy laugh that sounds like a miniature trumpet.
I read recently in Up Here magazine that black-billed magpies (Pica hudsonia) are relative newcomers to the North. They weren’t common above the 60th parallel until the 1990s, and if you trust the bird’s range map on field guides from Audubon or the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, you wouldn’t expect to see them anywhere in the Northwest Territories.
Yet here they are. Magpies are opportunistic and known to live in close proximity to people — and have been shown to strike up friendships with us. The Lewis and Clark journals are full of descriptions of them. They were often caught looting food from the expedition’s tents. In the North, magpies are now commonly spotted at Kam Lake near Yellowknife, a popular dog mushing spot, where they scavenge spilled kibble.
In 2006, residents of a community in Nunavut were surprised to see magpies picking through caribou meat on the tundra. A CBC article on the incident pointed to climate change. Fewer days of extreme cold in the winter, and the birds were moving in. The article also mentions the magpie’s gloomy perception in European folklore: “Generally speaking, the bird is associated with unhappiness and trouble.” As a bioindicator of an increasingly warming Arctic, that may be the case.
Does that make the magpie on my driveway a sinister omen or a friend? Most likely neither. He’s not as sinister as the oil drillers who continue to tear up landscapes and emit exorbitant amounts of greenhouse gases. His raucous laughter tells me he’s not here for friendship either. He’s just a forager collecting mud and sticks for a nest, unaware of which borders he's crossed along the way. Either way, I’ll keep a lookout for him each morning.
Austin Price
Contributing Editor, Earth Island Journal
Photo by: Eric Kilby
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