More letters and calls about magpies. Mostly from Dublin and nearby counties. Remarkable colonists, for David Cabot in his Irish Birds, Collins Guide, tells us that they are reputedly descended from a flock which arrived in Wexford in 1676. First recorded in Dublin in 1852, where, he says, "their numbers have almost reached pest proportions." What to do about them? Damien Maguire, a solicitor, of Maynooth sent a copy of an article on, the Larsen trap, mentioned here before.
It is a cage of wire netting and wood, with two compartments. Into one you put a magpie which you have caught. "A live call bird," the author of the article Duff Hart Davis has it. You keep feeding it, and other magpies drop down to see what it's all about and fall through a trap door. You then, take out the new victim, knock it on the head and wait for the next.
Hart Davis keeps the same decoy.
Others tend to put the new bird in decoy position and kill the other. The writer has got nine so far this year the neighbour from whom he borrowed it, took 37 the previous year and noticed an increase in song birds. This year, in early spring, he put as decoy a victim of last year which he had kept in the deep freeze, and, though just a corpse, brought sixteen more victims.
If this all sounds heartless, writes Hart Davis, "consider how many eggs and fledglings of songbirds I must have saved."
He attributes the increase in magpies to the fewer game keepers of today and also to the ban on organochlorine pesticides, which means an increase in grassland insects, and they form a staple item in the magpie's diet.
Just shows you how easy it is to upset the balance of nature.
What will result if we wipe out the magpie population or even seriously deplete it? It's an odd, and not entirely irrelevant fact, perhaps, that the RSPCA, the British organisation, informs us that between 25 and 60 per cent of any local population does not breed, but remains in flocks throughout the year.
Did someone suggest that if you put out plenty of peanuts in your garden, the magpies won't bother with eggs or scaldies?