Maggie
A unique Magpie
In late May 2025 I was helping a friend with some gardening work near Birmingham. The garden is one I used to look after for the clients before I reduced my gardening work to focus more on painting. The lovely, kind and elderly owners had sadly passed away within quick succession of each other and Pippa and I were just keeping on top of the garden for the solicitors while the machinery of probate slowly did it's work. It is a magical garden, the first I took on in the area and one of my favourite.
The garden was completely overgrown with laurel when I took it on in 2015 and I spent many hours reducing the beasts and revealing the layout of the Victorian garden beneath, it seemed to give the owners great joy to see it emerge and after about 5 years of working on it a little every week, we had restored it to something like it's original glory, with flowering Azaleas and Rhododendron, a huge wisteria, sumptuous hanging baskets over the porch, a little orchard planted around the solitary old Bramley apple tree, a woodland coppice and pond complete with hundreds of frogs.
Working in the garden without the clients being there anymore is a rather depressing and isolating feeling and it was good to have Pippa for company, I think she felt the same. She took over the garden from me a few years ago and it has continued to progress and flourish under her skilful hand, I just go back occasionally to help with heavier tasks. This May morning we had been grafting away on the lawn etc. when Pippa shouted for me to come and see something down by the pond, her large Hungarian Vizsla (dog) had found a bird and was pointing at it in hunting dog fashion, waiting for Pippa's approval. The young Magpie sat there, on the floor, rather pathetic in posture, apparently unaware of the imminent danger. I walked over and scooped it up. Upon doing so the dog bounded over eager to see what exactly it had found.
The Magpie was clearly weak and looked at me through its only eye, she was a bit of a sorry sight. The left eye seemingly either long gone, or never there, her beak is also misaligned making for a mutant penguin appearance. She was recently fledged, and I must say I would never take a healthy fledgling bird home and neither should you, in almost all cases. There is lots of advice on this out there this RSPCA advice is a good place to start . I looked around, it was clear no parents were nearby, she could fly but was too weak to even try and get away from us, the beak and eye situation would suggest she could not feed herself or keep up with the family, which is how the next stage of magpie life after the nest unfolds. A family unit which eventually splits as the young are strong and clever enough to feed themselves. They are, like most corvids, highly social birds. I have held a few corvid young before, notably jackdaws, once to free one from some garden netting in Lichfield, when the young bird screamed in panic at my attention, the sky turned black with a cacophony of sharply clacking jackdaws, I let it go after a quick inspection and it rejoined the swirling mass of extended family. Picking up the Magpie caused no such clamour, whilst they are not colony nesting birds like jackdaws, I would expect the two parents to be very loud if they had still been feeding her.
I looked at this pathetic and rather ugly little bird, and thought to myself - I don't really want a Magpie, I am too busy! - I thought maybe I would take her to an animal sanctuary. I couldn't leave her there as she would have certainly been dead pretty soon. She went into a shoebox in my van and the rest, as they say, is history.
It is fair to write that Maggie, as my children named her, very quickly won over the whole family. I walked into the house and announced that I had a Magpie, to which my poor wife announced "not another one Tom, I don't want a Magpie in the house", but within about an hour she was besotted. Maggie got used to me feeding her almost instantly and she wolfed down a whole packet of cat food in no time, along with some suet pellets and dried meal worms. She was full of beans from then on, and soon very happy to sit on one of our shoulders looking around in her own very special way. That first night she tucked her head away under her wing and would not bring it out for any amount of noise or disturbance, very amusing and it led me to wonder if she is deaf, but she hears well, she is just a character!
She runs round in circles due to the one eye, but over the last few months has become more adventurous and independent. Tearing around the kitchen floor after the children, skidding to a halt on her long legs. She is very fond of feet and will peck them affectionately if rather hard. When hungry she will pester for food and sometimes go off into the neighbours garden looking for it, when her belly is full she is quietly content to sit on your shoulder purring in your ear whilst enjoying a tickle behind the head. She will still beg for food when full but run off to hide it somewhere for later, her favourite place is under the sofa.
Maggie will happily sit on my shoulder whilst I paint or go for a walk, she just seems to like being around people, as I said before, they are social birds. Maggie has enriched our lives in the short time she has been with us and there are very few people she has not won over upon meeting them. Magpies are complicated birds in the minds of people, shrouded in superstition and much maligned for their preferred diet of the eggs and chicks of smaller species in the spring (which is what they feed to their own young). This however is the way things have been for millennia, it does not make a magpie evil anymore than you having a chicken dinner on a Sunday makes you evil, and is (almost certainly) more sustainable.
We shall see what the future holds for Maggie, for now she lives with us while she needs us, she is unable to feed herself due to her beak, this allows us to keep her under an exception in the wildlife and countryside act of 1981 which states that birds may be kept in captivity that are unfit for release. She is happily rolling a ball around in her cage, rather loudly, as I type.
Tame magpies will lure in other wild magpies for a look (a tactic sadly used to this day to persecute them, but obviously that is never going to be my intention). I spent a dramatic few minutes recently with Maggie on my shoulder and three wild magpies close by calling loudly as they viewed Maggie with interest and me with great suspicion. She was interested but made no attempt to go and join them.
We slipped into a routine of looking after Maggie and she quickly became a part of our little family unit, more so than any other bird or pet we have ever had. Lucy our neighbour was a great help, feeding Mags and giving her some company while we were at work and school.
Maggie developed a great fascination with rubbers (erasers for any American readers) she had a small collection of about half a dozen, prized rubbers which my children had given to her, she especially liked colourful ones with cartoon characters on. She would hide them around the house and then retrieve them to give them a darn good pecking. When you stumbled across her with her prized rubber she would eye you suspiciously, look back at the rubber, then back at you, then hop to another room to hide it from you.
I had a big exhibition in August in Herefordshire and Maggie stole the show. My friend Kat who lives and works at the venue remarked that she could spot where I was on site by the small throng of people gathered round, captivated by Mags. When the show was finished, I went to join my family in France and Maggie went for her own little holiday with some friends in Burton Dassett. They sent regular updates, their son Jamie and Mags soon becoming great friends. I returned from France and collected her, it was a life affirming moment when she immediately hopped up onto my hand, seemingly very pleased to see me.
Maggie died on August 29th 2025. I had put her outside in her run for the morning, a regular part of the usual routine, when I returned she was lying still and stiff, her head sticking through the bars, the flies already on her injuries. The other bird had attacked from her blind side, her good eye was still intact and closed peacefully in death, but her death was savage, I just hope it was quick. I believe it was most probably another magpie, drawn in to have a look and not willing to permit a foreign Maggie in it's territory. A sparrowhawk would surely have eaten what it could have, unless maybe we disturbed it. The wounds looked more like those that would be inflicted by a fellow corvid (member of the crow family)
The father in me wanted to find this murdering bird and tear it limb from limb, my children felt the same way for their avian sibling, when I told them, Lily screamed in rage "I want to kill whatever did this." Following a great deal of upset the children bounced back quickly and talk about Maggie a lot. They miss her. I am proud of their love for her. I know that nature is brutal, that is the way of things, and do not really blame whichever bird did it, but it feels so pointless.
Now I feel sad, and ashamed that I didn't protect her well enough, I feel naive that I thought she might have ever lasted out in the wild. A fine mesh on her run would've done it and she would still be with us. I miss Mags.
We buried her the next day in a straw lined shoe box, at the end of our back garden with a view of the Avon valley, near where we released the swifts some years before. We buried her with some of her favourite rubbers. I wet the dry earth and dug her a deep hole. Her beautiful black plated feet curled shut. I miss those warm feet curled gently around my outstretched hand, what a treat it was to have looked after Maggie, how rotten, how complete my failure to give her a longer life.
I am an infinitesimally small part of the huge network of evolving life, that began on this planet some 4 billion years ago. Which hopefully may go on for billions of years after my conscious self (my brain!) has died. If I, like Maggie, am buried in the earth, as will be my wish, then most of the cells and atoms that make me will be fed back into the system as my empty vessel is processed and repurposed by Sexton beetle larvae, by worms and other lifeforms which will be in turn be eaten by others, and so on. I find comfort in this, as others might do in faith. I feel eternally connected to the other life forms on Earth and to those which have come before.
Maggie was part of the same beautiful yet brutal system of natural life, we share common ancestors, way, way back in time, around 330 million years ago. For a short time this summer our paths crossed, she became one of the family and she enriched our little lives, giving them a bit more meaning, gifting us stories to tell each other about a ridiculous and wonderful little bird.
She was precious and fragile, life is both of these things, and mourning the loss of life is not a weakness, it shows compassion. It is just fine to be sad about the death of a pet. It is all too easy to feel awkward when other people are openly very upset by the death of their pet. "Come on now, it was just a dog" might be our internal reaction, whilst doing our best to seem compassionate. My eyes are open now, and I will be even more empathetic in future.
I will always regret not guarding Maggie more carefully, the shock of finding her dead when I had expected her to join me for the afternoon still makes me reel, it is etched there alongside other disturbing memories such as being awake during surgery and seeing the body of my mother the day she died; in the neurological draw labelled, 'I hope my kids don't have to go through anything this awful'.
Not a draw I wish to dip into regularly, instead I think about getting better just in time to meet my daughter, and later on my son. I remember mother taking me to Paris for my birthday one spring, about her love of plants and classical music, about her patience with, and love for her grandchildren.
I think of Maggie spinning in circles, chasing my children around the kitchen, hiding her collection of rubbers, her purring and clicking inquisitive sounds. I think of her jumping straight onto my hand after I had been away on holiday for a week and left her with friends, pleased to see me, her warm feet curved gently over my knuckle, a knowing look in her eye.
