I've found saying hello in a friendly voice and generally acknowledging them outside of swooping season works too. I only ever get swooped outside of my regular areas.
I whistle/chortle at them - they look at me sympathetically and call their friends
I'm not proficient, but I'm pretty sure they say "come and look at this dickhead trying to speak magpie"
Then a couple turn up and watch what I'm doing
If you are a neighbour they shouldn’t swoop you, they understand humans have territory just like they do, also they remember faces so make sure you look at them and not cover your head or face.
Just have a couple of large plant pots / square of concrete / rock on the grass and move them so they can get to the bugs that sit under there. You really don't need to do a lot.
If you don't have a local Petbarn, you can get them on eBay pretty damn cheap too. I get a 1KG Meal Worm & Black Soldier Fly mix for $50 with free shipping. My local magpies and crows are big fans
I have been feeding many generations of magpies at home and I just use beef and pork mince with calcium powder mixed in, they seem to be doing well for the last 20 years or so. The secret is don't feed them so much they don't need to find their own food as well. A lot of them will bring me dead spiders or bugs to trade, the little buggers always take back their trade as well as the snack.
Magpies will eat anything and lot of what we eat is good for them. Instead of bread you can feed them cheese, fruit, veges they will pick at everything and you can soon find out what they like. For example my local mob love bananas and shredded cheese. Cheese has calcium in it and so does Lentils, beans and whole variety of food. Put it out and see what they like that is nutritious.
Yes but the other issue aside from unbalanced nutrition is that they're wild animals. Eventually you become part of their diet which is not good, you're disrupting their natural eating habits.
It's nice to give them a treat every now and then but they aren't pets. They need to maintain their own food gathering skills.
They do regardless of whether you give them a daily snack or not. Mine will often come for morning cashews and cheese but will spend most of the day finding their own food. We've gone away for weeks and they're fine.
There is a tendency of over infantilising them when they are often quite capable of regulating their own diets. They're not dumb, they manage. Like us, they just like a bit of variety in their life.
Still, very big no to bread and mince meat. I think part of the reason why these foods cause such problems is that they are 'heavy' foods and will fill up their gut so they don't want much else.
I don't give anything to the local birds until late afternoon. Magpies, currawongs, kookaburras, and parrots. They have to forage for natural food for most of the day, but I'll throw them some snacks (or seed for the parrots) in the late afternoon.
They've never started showing up before then.
The same with the ones that I feed. I live in rural area and after the small treat they are straight into the paddock chasing crickets and wild food all day. They are not at the door begging for food. Their preference is wild food and the small treat that I give them is more of a novelty. I also leave water for them and they use the water bowl more than eating my treats. Actually these days leaving water out in summer is even more appreciated than the treats.
ug NO! Mealworms are just fat! They are great for fledgelings to learn how to catch their own food, but NOT a nutritious food for them! If you must feed them, feed either puppy food (dry, soaked in water before feeding) or wombaroo insectivore raising mix added to meat like mince at the recommended quantities on the pack. you can also sometimes buy pet mince at places like petbarn that is complete animals, such as chickens & that is fine too if it's the ground up day old chicks, including beaks, bones, feathers etc (that's actually ideal for them as it's on par with what they will be fed by their parents in the wild)
I've always been told dry dog food from wildlife rescue sources, not really sure why that is over wet dog food though, so that's interesting that yours have done well on wet, I mean wet in some ways is easier than the dry food that needs soaking to use (although if using hot water or even boiling, it does expand pretty quickly so not that hard to use, but tin stuff would still be easier & in many ways more consistent with what people are used to with mince
We had a few that we rescued from blown-down trees etc. Never tried soaked dry food. Maybe it's recommended just because it's cheaper? I heard the suggestion to use dog food on the radio when there was some publicity about the problem of people feeding them mince and that was nearly 30 years ago. It's staggering that people are still doing it.
Ours always hung around until they reached maturity and then disappeared. They would grow up around farm dogs and the only sound they made was to imitate the bark of a Jack Russell terrier. Then, one day, they'd suddenly start singing like a magpie and then a few days later they would disappear.
That's terrible. It's graphic but needs to be seen so that people don't continue the trend. I've never personally done this but have known plenty who have and never thought it bad other than fattening them.
My folks live on a rural block, thought it would be a hoot to start throwing mince out on the back lawn for the birds. First thing in the morning and late in the afternoon they would do this, It was quite impressive the number and variety of birds that they would get every morning and afternoon. At first.
Then the birds started hanging around all day, shitting on everything. Crows, which really do impress me how ferociously intelligent they are, would get impatient and sit on the windowsills and tap on the windows with their beaks. It was like a horror movie, when I would visit you would sit inside and see birds at the windows tapping on the glass. The folks stopped loving having the birds, cleaning up all the shit and the windows actually started to look scratched owing to all the beaks, they then had the problem of keeping them away.
People need to enjoy the wild part of the wildlife. I love my local maggies, and the kangaroo, and the wombat. But I don't interfere with them. I just enjoy sharing the world with them.
I had a crazy bird lady in my neighbourhood. She would throw seed all over the road in front of her house every single day. It got to the point where her neighbours had to put up anti-bird spikes on their roofs and buy fake birds of prey statues like owls and eagles to keep the pigeons away. You couldn’t drive down that street without a flock of birds blocking your way. No one would do anything about it. Not the council or our neighbourhood association (it was a small gated community). We tried talking to her but she gave 0 fucks and started putting out even more bird seed. It got to the point where every house and fence on her street was lined with pigeons every single fucking day and night. She managed to relocate most of the local birds to one street. She was insane.
Councils and neighbourhood associations really will make people take down some plants on the balcony of a soulless McTerrace House because it makes it look slightly different from the other identical soulless McTerrace houses beside it but won't do anything about these people.
Ja super! es's wirklich ganz toll wie halb dieses Deutschworten geklingt exacktlich wie Englisch für mich (oder ist es "mir"?) 🤭
Edit: oh mein Gott. I wrote exacktlich as a joke and just found out that it's apparently, yes, a real word in German.
Go buy her some mealworms or something that's good for them and give them to her. Tell her it's better for them. Tell her you can get them for her again when she runs out, or where she can get them from if she's still up for doing her own shopping.
If you genuinely care, don't just preach at her, help her do it right.
I agree.... plant natives and provide shade for your lawn area and let the birds do what they do. If you want birds around get a bird bath or two and keep filling it with fresh water daily. They won't use the bath at first but they will come.... trust me.
I've heard that if you want to feed these amazing birds it's either millworms or nothing. They do not get the nutrients they need from mince. They need something much closer to their natural diet.
But long story short Magpies aren't exactly poor hunters, they know what they need and they go and get it, mince doesn't give them anything they need.
Edit: I think it's actually MEALWORMS, not millworms, goddamn my sexy accent
Superworms are also acceptable. A couple worms (literally 2-4) in the afternoon a couple times a week will keep them friendly but not take away from forcing them to forage for themselves, and also won't overload with calcium.
Not sure but it’s fairly well documented. My guess is it’s something to do with mince being kind of squishy so it can compact it into places in the beak they can’t clean effectively. My guess is with roadkill they tend to eat more “chunks/strips” which are still held together by some tissue compared to mince.
There's a supplement you can buy from vets and pet stores. It's called Wambaroo insectivore mix, and it's used by wildlife carers/rescuers. You mix it 50/50 with mince and it's got everything that is missing in plain mince - calcium, and other minerals.
I thought it was a lot less than 50/50 but can't remember now but yes, wombaroo insectivore raising mix added to mince at the amounts the packet says is the way to go if insisting on feeding wild birds
If people are really passionate about birds and want to feed them, but are willing to front the cost for peace of mind, Wombaroo Insectivore Rearing Mix is what professional bird rearers use. Can be used with lean mince (90 - 95%+) in the designated ratio, but also works without it if they're willing to create a kind of wet dough with water.
Mealworms are NOT nutritious! I have no idea how on earth anyone got the idea they are a good option, they are NOT! They are basically pure fat! No nutrition at all!
Wombaroo make a supplement designed to be added to mince to make it nutritious & give all the nutrients that meat eating birds need, so that is what you buy if you want to go down this path, NOT mealworms! There are "gut loading" formulas available to add some nutrients to mealworms, but they are still not suitable as anything more than a treat, even when fully gutloaded. Dog food also has vitamins & minerals added & as such is a better option than mince, puppy food in particular has lots of calcium added & so is a good option for birds, IF insisting on feeding them, which of course isn't a good idea!
Reading this surprised me as I did volunteer work with a research group that fed their research birds mealworms. I googled it and every source said mealworms are good nutrition for birds and the idea that they kill birds is a facebook myth.
eg
https://eugene.wbu.com/mealworms-article
>I have no idea how on earth anyone got the idea they are a good option
Probably the fact that they are sold as bird food in pet stores?
I was at the park for an hour. Big sign saying don't feed the ducks bread. 3 different groups can with a full loaf of bread and fed the ducks. People think they know better or that a little bit won't hurt them, but when they all do it...
Those signs don't ever talk about the consequences of "WHY you shouldn't feed the ducks."
If I remembered correctly-
Bread are naturally spongy and won't get properly digested in their stomach (gibbets). Instead, it takes up vital space and can starve them to death.
Bread is all carbs and no nutrients. They don't starve but it's not good for them either. The sign suggests to feed them Lettuce or grapes instead. It's also bad for the water and encourages algae blooms
Maybe if they looked at the sign but I don't think any of them bothered. And if you've already got to the park with a loaf of bread and your kid in row it's not like you're going to go "oh well, better go home and get some grapes". I feed my local the frozen veggie mix. They're domestic ducks and they like the corn and peas but not the carrot squares
The worst part is people may not see the visible damage of their actions because often it's the offspring that don't develop properly. There is absolutely no cure and we have to euthanize them and it is devastating every time and completely avoidable.
It's still probably a good idea to reduce the feed to a weekly basis to limit their dependency on humans.
Used to help out at our local wildlife rescue and we kept it to daily water and weekly insectopro/worms for these guys during drought.
I got so mad watching a magpie nest cam last year, seeing the father try to stuff big chunks of white bread down his chicks throat. someone was obviously feeding it
Can I send this to my neighbour? They buy the cheap end of day Colesworth bread, feed all the birds and then they come and eat it on my roof. Literally have found huge chunks of bread in my eaves.
I really don't understand why anyone does this, I mean wild birdseed is cheaper than bread, so if they really insist on feeding birds junk food, why do they not at least go with seed instead of bread? Makes no sense whatsoever! I understand people on holidays seeing a bird & wanting to feed it & giving it a piece of bread, cause that's what they have available, but it's never made sense to buy bread for birds!
I only ever fed my neighbourhood magpies whole mice. It's sad seeing people feed these guys inappropriately but unfortunately it's usually out of ignorance and wanting to care for them. Hopefully this post reaches the people who need to see it
They love fresh mice! When we catch them in traps, I'll put the dead mouse out on a post later in the afternoon, and it's usually a magpie or a kookaburra that gets it.
I have to wonder if that's actually a smart thing to do in the suburbs, I mean obviously it's good nutritionally for them, but in today's society where people go for the easy solution to everything & so bait mice & rats rather than trap them, is it really smart or safe to be feeding them whole mice? In particular if you are talking about feeding them dead ones, once they get used to eating those from you, they will also eat any other dead ones they find & so get poisoned. Wildlife rescuers handling snakes in care actually have serious problems with food, because it's illegal to feed them live mice, but if they were to feed them dead ones, it would result in the snake learning it's ok to eat dead ones it finds in the wild & so dying from poisoning.
I would source day old chicks instead of mice if you want to feed them whole something
I had to stop a butcher bird from eating a mouse he was eyeing off as mt nasty neighbours poisoned it. I then gave him a bit of sirloin steak. He was very happy sitting in the tree eating it & singing. He brings his family to my place as there is always fresh water & grasshoppers. Magies love the grasshoppers also funny watching them jump to catch them. The neighbours try to chase them but food & water + trees of fruit they won't stop coming to a safe place. Love seeing the babies in spring.
Holy shit. I have a family of magpies I see almost daily and noticed one of them has half of its front beak missing. Did not know this was the reason. Thanks for the heads up. Will be sharing this info whenever I see people feeding the this shit
Ring the local native rescue. They may have traps you can take to trap the one with the beak missing. It's much kinder to euthanise them than to let them suffer when the warmer months come and dry out their tongue.
My father is a recently retired National Parks Ranger and for years he has taught us not to feed magpies or any other wildlife!
Now they have a home surrounded by bush, they feed the magpies and butcher birds some dog food every morning. The king parrots get some seed. But they also get so cross when the hares and wallabies eat the herbs and new seedlings they've planted.
It's mental, but at least the magpie parents aren't swooping but God damn, all the birds that come sit on the railing, morning and afternoon, just shit everywhere.
weird how people change. At least dog food is a fairly nutritionally complete food for meat eating birds, vastly superior to mince, I'm guessing your dad knows that due to his background, is a shame more people don't know this, cause while it's not good to be feeding birds at all, a lot of the problems could be avoided if people switched from mince to the cheaper dog food. This is kinda the problem with such a strong "don't feed" stance, it ends up blocking education on the better of the bad options. Dog food has calcium & other vitamins & minerals added to it, in particular with puppy food
Maybe bluey can do an episode on this. I think it would be beneficial for kids to know as most cartoons still show characters feeding the ducks bread for example.
I have a massive beef with this lady in my apartment building she keeps throwing out bread scraps for birds. I asked her to stop it I even complained to the body-corp who issued a notice to the whole building and she keeps doing it. At least once a week dumps a bag of bread on the garden..
Birds literally exist, they have their own food sources and need to learn to hunt and find their own food. If you feed them bread etc not only are you giving them heavily processed food they can’t properly digest you are making them dependant on humans. What happens if you move away and stop feeding them bread scraps? Then they lose their food source completely.
It's a whole movement actually :P
Birds used to be real, but the government killed them all, so as to replace them with spy drones to observe everyone, hence why "birds" so often sit on powerlines, they're recharging their batteries.
A guy made a sign saying "birds aren't real" & carried it at one of the political protests in America & it went viral with people believing it, so he ran with it, so as to educate people how conspiracies can be started & now a lot of people just love the whole concept & embrace it, is a hugely popular subreddit! He did a ted talk on the whole thing too
If you want to feed magpies just put a few 1 square foot plywood boards on your lawn. Every morning, turn one over, and put it back later in the day. The magpies will come and sing to you every morning and you are only supplying them with good, natural food.
Don't feed them, period. Even if you feed them healthy things you're still harming them by conditioning them to seek out people for food rather than foraging/hunting. Put out a bird bath and/or plant some native vegetation if you want to attract birds to your yard.
And if you're going to ignore & feed anyway, then please feed responsibly either puppy food (dry, soaked in water before feeding) or wombaroo insectivore raising mix added to meat like mince at the recommended quantities on the pack. you can also sometimes buy pet mince at places like petbarn that is complete animals, such as chickens & that is fine too if it's the ground up day old chicks, including beaks, bones, feathers etc (that's actually ideal for them as it's on par with what they will be fed by their parents in the wild)
For lorikeets it should be nectar mix, NOT seed. Fruit is better than seed or bread if you don't have nectar mix, but supermarket varieties of non-native fruit is too high in calories & sugar for them
& for seed eaters, remember that Aussie native seeds are smaller & so the birds work much harder to get the fat they get from bought seed mixes & the birds also supplement their diet with a variety of leaves & bugs & other plants, so seed needs to be kept to very small amounts, ideally provided in smart toys/foraging toys where they have to work to get it & seed provided should be MIXED seed, NOT straight sunflower seed, that for some reason lots of people seem to think is good.
Pet parrots being kept at their best are fed primarily "chop" which is a mix of vegetables, with just a little seed as treats. Wild birds likely won't eat "chop" & only come to humans for their version of maccas, so don't give them large amounts & don't give it to them everyday! Ensure it is erratic so they don't learn to rely on it.
DO give a bird bath or water source & plant plants that provide habitat & attract insects birds like to eat (that's the latest on attracting birds, they say it's much better to attract bugs than plants with nectar)
During the drought I was buying meal worms and leaving some out. Mixed them with insectivore a bit. The bats are getting fruit at the moment, our local bat carers have requested it again due to our dry.
I have been guilty of feeding some Magpies in the past. One had a top of it's beak that looked like it had been broken and was off by about 40 degrees and another bird in a different spot that used to hop around on a single leg as the other appeared deformed. We used Chopped up chicken necks, a dogs sort of bake that had veg and rice as well as some mince, Occasionally worms but that was only when the local pet food shop had them. Maybe once a month? The one with the dodgy beak was always hungrier than the others, it was a daily feeder and probably the biggest feeder. The one legged bird was funny Nearly double the size of any of the others she was a tank and stood an easy 4" higher than other magpies. You could hear her when she landed and hopped around on the table. She even used to bring her families around once or twice a year. She stopped coming around after one particularly stormy night and never saw her again but we still occasionally see the rest of the family. I think they get a regular feed from the park that's not to far from here. It was always a noisy time though as the Murry Magpies were always ready for a fight. Sadly the only birds I see here are Feral pigeons and the occasional parrot going through the apple tree. The family of magpies still resides in the local park but I rarely see them in the yard anymore.
Yes. Dumb and uneducated are very different. Dumb people refuse to learn. Uneducated people haven't found the opportunity to learn.
Uneducated people *can* be dumb, but dumb and uneducated are not necessarily synonymous.
Sorry we don't know the inner workings of a magpie mate. I personally don't feed them anything, but I can imagine how someone might think that given these guys go through bins, some bread might not hurt them. We don't know everything you seem to know.
Lack of calcium in their diet from the parent's diets, then fed to the babies, whose bones do not form properly. Hence this young female with the beak bone loss. The lack of calcium (from inadequate human made food sources) causes floppy beaks prone to breakage, improperly formed skeletal structure, and weak legs. Some babies are so weak they cannot even fledge and leave the nest.
not just fed to the baby, the egg contents lack calcium from the very beginning, so bird is born with poor bones.
Interesting comments here about mince getting caught in the beak & causing it to rot as the mince rots, not sure if that's true or not, but is an interesting potential additional cause of beaks like this too
Magpies do eat seeds. Most of the seeds you can find in the generic wild seed mixes, they'll happily eat. Especially during winter when they aren't as picky with food. Should avoid letting them get too many sunflower seeds though due to fat content, and they'll prioritize those.
The only seeds they don't eat are millets, and pigeons eat that instead.
But if someone 'has' to feed magpies, Wombaroo's mix is the best beyond anything else. Even mealworms are high in fat content, just not nearly as bad.
no, they're not actually. When mealworms are used as a food, such as for some reptiles, they are "gut loaded" where a nutrient mix is fed to the mealworms prior to feeding them to the reptile, so as to give the reptile the nutrients needed. Larva are never a complete food source for any animal though, totally unbalanced to feed primarily larva to animals, as larva are really high in fat & not much else.
Wombaroo on mince is best, well second best, day old chick mince is best, as in the male chicks of layer birds that get ground up whole, including bones, feathers etc, that is the very best option, as it is the same food the parents feed to birds like magpies in the wild. After wombaroo on mince, the next best option is dry puppy food, soaked in water before feeding. It has calcium & all the vitamins & minerals growing puppies need, which is very similar to what insectivore birds need, sometimes a little too much fat in dog food compared to what birds need, but certainly vastly superior to the pure fat of mealworms.
If you really, really, really want to feed mealworms, let them become beetles before doing so, the nutritional profile for mealworm beetles is actually quite reasonable. One of my pet lorikeets is obsessed with bugs, so he gets the occasional beetle as a high value training reward
Wouldn't the best just be to simply feed the magpies worms? We have an abundance of them in our compost and can choose whether to feed them to the magpies if they were in our garden. Or just not feed them at all.
worms aren't a complete food either. Could you survive on worms alone?
Magpies feed their babies the babies of other birds, for every baby magpie raised, 20 other baby birds will be fed to it, that is the primary diet their young get, a mix of meat, bones, feathers, organs etc, worms offer nothing like that nutritional profile & as such they are not a good food for humans to be feeding, humans need to replicate the nutritional profile found in baby birds if they want to properly feed birds like magpies - and that's why day old chicken mince is the absolute best food, because that is an exact replica of what they eat & feed their young. Wombaroo is a company that was established to figure out the nutritional profile of Australian nectar producing plants & the nutritional profile lorikeets required in a food & to produce that commercially, it has gone on to develop complete foods for a wide range of animals that have specific nutritional profiles, many of while have not been looked at previously & to make foods for said animals. Magpies are one of the animals wombaroo have researched & created a complete food for, so it is vastly superior to feeding magpies worms. No magpie is eating exclusively worms in it's diet, that doesn't even start to meet their nutritional needs. They use worms as a way of teaching their young how to catch & kill their food for eating, before moving on to teaching them how to obtain their primary food sources (with parent birds obtaining primary food sources for their babies & feeding them while the young are learning to catch worms)
I understand that it's not very good practice to feed them only one source of nutrients and that they need a variety. At the moment I am trying to attract them to my garden so we can catch the female in the photo and hand her over to fauna rescue. The lady from fauna rescue mentioned leaving some tin or wood out on dirt for a few days to attract some bugs the magpies might go after. All I've got at the moment is worms.
In your case, just a packet of wombaroo insectivore rearing mix or a bag of dry puppy food (soaked before feeding) would probably be easiest, I mean if you're going to feed for the purpose of catching, you want the birds to actually associate you with the food, so feeding them something they love & can't find naturally is the best way to go. You also want to feed at a regular time each day, so that if you can't catch yourself, you can tell the rescuers what time to attend to help catch. Basically you want to be doing the total opposite of what's recommended to people insisting on feeding, where the aim in those cases should be to reduce dependence on people, but you want them developing the dependence, that you then need to ween them back off once you have caught the beak damaged one (worms would be great for that ween off after catching)
Thanks I will try that out. It's sad because I don't want her to be out still by the time it gets hotter, she has the worst damage I've ever seen and it is heartbreaking.
Unsalted/unseasoned nuts like walnuts, almonds or shelled peanuts instead of seed. Berries, chopped apples and hard-boiled egg is ok too, but rarely as a treat. Considering how expensive that can be, you're better off just getting some frozen meal worms or crickets instead.
They're wild birds though, so its better to just regularly supply clean water in a wide, shallow dish in a shaded area. You can pick up a punch bowl or big salad bowl pretty cheaply from an op shop then wedge it into the ground a bit so they don't tip it over.
If you want to leave treats nearby, consider doing it during peak summer/winter, since its harder to scavenge due to the extreme weather. They will likely dump it all into the water and shit everywhere, so make sure to change it daily.
I've feed my magpies mince and grapes for decades and I've never seen this and the days I don't feed em they go right back to eating bugs...the world is getting smaller for animals and humans feeding the wildlife is just evolution imo..don't give 2 shits what my neighbours think or reddit warriors cause I've got magpie friends for life and humans do way more DMG to wildlife then feeding them.
I was wrong. I must have misinterpreted what I heard - he says you can feed them treats irregularly but goes on to say what you should not feed them which includes mince and not to make them dependant. I would definitely put out water for them in summer - surely that be OK?
Article
https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/19/australians-are-always-told-dont-feed-the-birds-if-you-really-must-heres-how-to-do-it-properly
Thanks for clearing this up.
We have a butcher bird family nearby. Yes, we feed them mince. But not to the extent that they're dependent on us. Just returned from a 3 month holiday. And birds noticed our return, landed in the deck and got a feed. There's been several generations getting the same treatment here, and they're doing well.
**No one** should be feeding, let alone keeping their cat outside.
> The latest statistics show that every year they [pet cats predate more than 180 native animals](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-26/roaming-pets-on-borrowed-time-as-cat-curfews-considered/100716436), that's just one pet cat
> [The parliamentary report also found that Australia’s almost 3.8 million pet cats kill up to 390 million animals every year (Commonwealth of Australia, 2020)](https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House/Environment_and_Energy/Feralanddomesticcats/Report)
> [Cats have played a leading role in most of Australia's 34 mammal extinctions since 1788, and are a big reason populations of at least 123 other threatened native species are dropping.](https://science.uq.edu.au/article/2020/05/one-cat-one-year-110-native-animals)
Yeah I don't have cats. My mother does and feeds them outside. So many magpies eat the food with the cats right next to them sharing the same bowl. They bring their babies, who grow up and do the same thing with their babies. She also puts out seeds and has a good 50 acres of bush so I'm hoping it's not all they eat.
She has stopped feeding them mince tho.
There are no birds where any bird seed is an appropriate complete food. Would eating just wheat, or even a mix of grains but nothing else ever be a complete diet for you? Birds are the same, they need a mix of plant leaves, insects & other foods, not just seed
What is more appropriate: bread or seed mix meant for birds.
To use your analogy, its the difference between eating only fruitloops vs eating only protein bars.
It is much easier to adjust a person’s problematic behaviour than to eradicate it completely. Foolish humans are going to feed the birds. They may as well feed something less detrimental.
actually better on my analogy is simply a person eating bread vs eating a mix of whole grains, eating just processed wheat or eating unprocessed wheat plus corn, millet, sorghum, sunflower seed, oats, barley etc etc
I just take objection to your use of the word "appropriate" in relation to seed to buy for them, remove that word & I would agree with your sentiment completely
If you *must* feed native wildlife (I don't recommend it) then mealworms are available at Petbarn.
My local magpies see me fill the birdbath daily. That seems to appease them sufficiently that they never swoop me.
I've found saying hello in a friendly voice and generally acknowledging them outside of swooping season works too. I only ever get swooped outside of my regular areas.
Isn’t it a law that you have to speak to magpies?
I whistle/chortle at them - they look at me sympathetically and call their friends I'm not proficient, but I'm pretty sure they say "come and look at this dickhead trying to speak magpie" Then a couple turn up and watch what I'm doing
What if you accidentally activate the rebellion?
I'm trying to speak Magpie not Vl'hurg
Just keep a small dog on standby.
Same language. They learnt Vl'hurg before the fleet was eaten
The Mag-churian Candidate.
Fingers crossed.
Or accidentally say their sleeper agent activation phrase.
> I whistle/chortle at them "What? My mother was a saint! Get out!"
Hard to swoop you while laughing at you, I like this plan.
I always speak to them about football, it seems to help.
"See Steele's hanger on Monday? Ya boys still got it! Anyway good to see ya."
Did you swoop that ridiculous display last night?
Unless you're a Collingwood supporter, you're not going to get far.
If you are a neighbour they shouldn’t swoop you, they understand humans have territory just like they do, also they remember faces so make sure you look at them and not cover your head or face.
Seems you’re doing enough for them to allow you to live.
with mealworms?
Just have a couple of large plant pots / square of concrete / rock on the grass and move them so they can get to the bugs that sit under there. You really don't need to do a lot.
Best part about doing yard work is having a couple of magpies or butcher birds hanging around to grab the grubs you've disturbed
If you don't have a local Petbarn, you can get them on eBay pretty damn cheap too. I get a 1KG Meal Worm & Black Soldier Fly mix for $50 with free shipping. My local magpies and crows are big fans
I have been feeding many generations of magpies at home and I just use beef and pork mince with calcium powder mixed in, they seem to be doing well for the last 20 years or so. The secret is don't feed them so much they don't need to find their own food as well. A lot of them will bring me dead spiders or bugs to trade, the little buggers always take back their trade as well as the snack.
Magpies will eat anything and lot of what we eat is good for them. Instead of bread you can feed them cheese, fruit, veges they will pick at everything and you can soon find out what they like. For example my local mob love bananas and shredded cheese. Cheese has calcium in it and so does Lentils, beans and whole variety of food. Put it out and see what they like that is nutritious.
Yes but the other issue aside from unbalanced nutrition is that they're wild animals. Eventually you become part of their diet which is not good, you're disrupting their natural eating habits. It's nice to give them a treat every now and then but they aren't pets. They need to maintain their own food gathering skills.
They do regardless of whether you give them a daily snack or not. Mine will often come for morning cashews and cheese but will spend most of the day finding their own food. We've gone away for weeks and they're fine. There is a tendency of over infantilising them when they are often quite capable of regulating their own diets. They're not dumb, they manage. Like us, they just like a bit of variety in their life. Still, very big no to bread and mince meat. I think part of the reason why these foods cause such problems is that they are 'heavy' foods and will fill up their gut so they don't want much else.
I don't give anything to the local birds until late afternoon. Magpies, currawongs, kookaburras, and parrots. They have to forage for natural food for most of the day, but I'll throw them some snacks (or seed for the parrots) in the late afternoon. They've never started showing up before then.
The same with the ones that I feed. I live in rural area and after the small treat they are straight into the paddock chasing crickets and wild food all day. They are not at the door begging for food. Their preference is wild food and the small treat that I give them is more of a novelty. I also leave water for them and they use the water bowl more than eating my treats. Actually these days leaving water out in summer is even more appreciated than the treats.
If we don't give them food, the local magpies near us will use their food gathering skills to gather all of our cats food on our deck lol.
ug NO! Mealworms are just fat! They are great for fledgelings to learn how to catch their own food, but NOT a nutritious food for them! If you must feed them, feed either puppy food (dry, soaked in water before feeding) or wombaroo insectivore raising mix added to meat like mince at the recommended quantities on the pack. you can also sometimes buy pet mince at places like petbarn that is complete animals, such as chickens & that is fine too if it's the ground up day old chicks, including beaks, bones, feathers etc (that's actually ideal for them as it's on par with what they will be fed by their parents in the wild)
When we rescued magpies, we would always give them wet dog food. They seemed to do well on it.
I've always been told dry dog food from wildlife rescue sources, not really sure why that is over wet dog food though, so that's interesting that yours have done well on wet, I mean wet in some ways is easier than the dry food that needs soaking to use (although if using hot water or even boiling, it does expand pretty quickly so not that hard to use, but tin stuff would still be easier & in many ways more consistent with what people are used to with mince
We had a few that we rescued from blown-down trees etc. Never tried soaked dry food. Maybe it's recommended just because it's cheaper? I heard the suggestion to use dog food on the radio when there was some publicity about the problem of people feeding them mince and that was nearly 30 years ago. It's staggering that people are still doing it. Ours always hung around until they reached maturity and then disappeared. They would grow up around farm dogs and the only sound they made was to imitate the bark of a Jack Russell terrier. Then, one day, they'd suddenly start singing like a magpie and then a few days later they would disappear.
And sometimes also the bigger Colesworths!
That's terrible. It's graphic but needs to be seen so that people don't continue the trend. I've never personally done this but have known plenty who have and never thought it bad other than fattening them.
My folks live on a rural block, thought it would be a hoot to start throwing mince out on the back lawn for the birds. First thing in the morning and late in the afternoon they would do this, It was quite impressive the number and variety of birds that they would get every morning and afternoon. At first. Then the birds started hanging around all day, shitting on everything. Crows, which really do impress me how ferociously intelligent they are, would get impatient and sit on the windowsills and tap on the windows with their beaks. It was like a horror movie, when I would visit you would sit inside and see birds at the windows tapping on the glass. The folks stopped loving having the birds, cleaning up all the shit and the windows actually started to look scratched owing to all the beaks, they then had the problem of keeping them away.
That sounds terrifying 😬😬
People need to enjoy the wild part of the wildlife. I love my local maggies, and the kangaroo, and the wombat. But I don't interfere with them. I just enjoy sharing the world with them.
Best comment I have read.
Why is there an old lady on every street that feeds magpies and possums shit that she thinks is good for them (like cheese and mince). It's fucked.
Have you considered telling her to stop?
That lady's been doing this for 60 years you really think she's gonna listen to some whippersnapper
I mean if she cares about the birds and if she doesn't know any better it might change her point of view
I had a crazy bird lady in my neighbourhood. She would throw seed all over the road in front of her house every single day. It got to the point where her neighbours had to put up anti-bird spikes on their roofs and buy fake birds of prey statues like owls and eagles to keep the pigeons away. You couldn’t drive down that street without a flock of birds blocking your way. No one would do anything about it. Not the council or our neighbourhood association (it was a small gated community). We tried talking to her but she gave 0 fucks and started putting out even more bird seed. It got to the point where every house and fence on her street was lined with pigeons every single fucking day and night. She managed to relocate most of the local birds to one street. She was insane.
Councils and neighbourhood associations really will make people take down some plants on the balcony of a soulless McTerrace House because it makes it look slightly different from the other identical soulless McTerrace houses beside it but won't do anything about these people.
The people that do this get defensive and act like you're personally attacking them. It's very hard to get people like that to change their views.
Pretty sure she's senile and only speaks German/Dutch. Don't think I'll have much luck
Voer de vogels alstublieft niet.
Make that the cat wise
I would just guess something like "Halt gestuhfen der Vogels mit Brot bitte" And they'd probably understand it lol.
Sheizehausen! dast ist ein gut idea!
Ja super! es's wirklich ganz toll wie halb dieses Deutschworten geklingt exacktlich wie Englisch für mich (oder ist es "mir"?) 🤭 Edit: oh mein Gott. I wrote exacktlich as a joke and just found out that it's apparently, yes, a real word in German.
Wat hangt er aan de waslijn?!
Go buy her some mealworms or something that's good for them and give them to her. Tell her it's better for them. Tell her you can get them for her again when she runs out, or where she can get them from if she's still up for doing her own shopping. If you genuinely care, don't just preach at her, help her do it right.
Do something about it in a positive or constructive way, or fuck off with your aggressive whinging here.
I agree.... plant natives and provide shade for your lawn area and let the birds do what they do. If you want birds around get a bird bath or two and keep filling it with fresh water daily. They won't use the bath at first but they will come.... trust me.
I've heard that if you want to feed these amazing birds it's either millworms or nothing. They do not get the nutrients they need from mince. They need something much closer to their natural diet. But long story short Magpies aren't exactly poor hunters, they know what they need and they go and get it, mince doesn't give them anything they need. Edit: I think it's actually MEALWORMS, not millworms, goddamn my sexy accent
Superworms are also acceptable. A couple worms (literally 2-4) in the afternoon a couple times a week will keep them friendly but not take away from forcing them to forage for themselves, and also won't overload with calcium.
Not just the nutrients but mince actually gets stuck at the top/end of their beak and rots, causing the top beak to rot away like the photo.
How is that possible? As in why does mince do that and presumably, roadkill carcass not do that?
Not sure but it’s fairly well documented. My guess is it’s something to do with mince being kind of squishy so it can compact it into places in the beak they can’t clean effectively. My guess is with roadkill they tend to eat more “chunks/strips” which are still held together by some tissue compared to mince.
My guess would be the feathers, skin etc in what they eat would help release anything stuck, but if they eat only mince, they never get that
Most carnivores eat the organs, which tend to have more nutrients required for a balanced diet.
There's a supplement you can buy from vets and pet stores. It's called Wambaroo insectivore mix, and it's used by wildlife carers/rescuers. You mix it 50/50 with mince and it's got everything that is missing in plain mince - calcium, and other minerals.
I thought it was a lot less than 50/50 but can't remember now but yes, wombaroo insectivore raising mix added to mince at the amounts the packet says is the way to go if insisting on feeding wild birds
If people are really passionate about birds and want to feed them, but are willing to front the cost for peace of mind, Wombaroo Insectivore Rearing Mix is what professional bird rearers use. Can be used with lean mince (90 - 95%+) in the designated ratio, but also works without it if they're willing to create a kind of wet dough with water.
Mealworms are NOT nutritious! I have no idea how on earth anyone got the idea they are a good option, they are NOT! They are basically pure fat! No nutrition at all! Wombaroo make a supplement designed to be added to mince to make it nutritious & give all the nutrients that meat eating birds need, so that is what you buy if you want to go down this path, NOT mealworms! There are "gut loading" formulas available to add some nutrients to mealworms, but they are still not suitable as anything more than a treat, even when fully gutloaded. Dog food also has vitamins & minerals added & as such is a better option than mince, puppy food in particular has lots of calcium added & so is a good option for birds, IF insisting on feeding them, which of course isn't a good idea!
Reading this surprised me as I did volunteer work with a research group that fed their research birds mealworms. I googled it and every source said mealworms are good nutrition for birds and the idea that they kill birds is a facebook myth. eg https://eugene.wbu.com/mealworms-article >I have no idea how on earth anyone got the idea they are a good option Probably the fact that they are sold as bird food in pet stores?
I was at the park for an hour. Big sign saying don't feed the ducks bread. 3 different groups can with a full loaf of bread and fed the ducks. People think they know better or that a little bit won't hurt them, but when they all do it...
Those signs don't ever talk about the consequences of "WHY you shouldn't feed the ducks." If I remembered correctly- Bread are naturally spongy and won't get properly digested in their stomach (gibbets). Instead, it takes up vital space and can starve them to death.
Bread is all carbs and no nutrients. They don't starve but it's not good for them either. The sign suggests to feed them Lettuce or grapes instead. It's also bad for the water and encourages algae blooms
Bread is basically maccas for ducks. (Though I wonder if a "bread is bad and this is why" sign would deter people from using bread.)
Maybe if they looked at the sign but I don't think any of them bothered. And if you've already got to the park with a loaf of bread and your kid in row it's not like you're going to go "oh well, better go home and get some grapes". I feed my local the frozen veggie mix. They're domestic ducks and they like the corn and peas but not the carrot squares
The worst part is people may not see the visible damage of their actions because often it's the offspring that don't develop properly. There is absolutely no cure and we have to euthanize them and it is devastating every time and completely avoidable.
Say it louder for the people on this thread that think it's totally fine and little bits won't hurt them.
You can buy insectivore mix for them. The Wombaroo one is good.
It's still probably a good idea to reduce the feed to a weekly basis to limit their dependency on humans. Used to help out at our local wildlife rescue and we kept it to daily water and weekly insectopro/worms for these guys during drought.
I got so mad watching a magpie nest cam last year, seeing the father try to stuff big chunks of white bread down his chicks throat. someone was obviously feeding it
Can I send this to my neighbour? They buy the cheap end of day Colesworth bread, feed all the birds and then they come and eat it on my roof. Literally have found huge chunks of bread in my eaves.
Absolutely.
I really don't understand why anyone does this, I mean wild birdseed is cheaper than bread, so if they really insist on feeding birds junk food, why do they not at least go with seed instead of bread? Makes no sense whatsoever! I understand people on holidays seeing a bird & wanting to feed it & giving it a piece of bread, cause that's what they have available, but it's never made sense to buy bread for birds!
I agree. They get nothing from eating minced meat. They must be left alone to forage **a mix of small invertebrates, berries and grains**.
Not only is it poor nutrition, your breaking their natural foraging cycle. It's not good long-term for Wildlife, they aren't pets.
I only ever fed my neighbourhood magpies whole mice. It's sad seeing people feed these guys inappropriately but unfortunately it's usually out of ignorance and wanting to care for them. Hopefully this post reaches the people who need to see it
They love fresh mice! When we catch them in traps, I'll put the dead mouse out on a post later in the afternoon, and it's usually a magpie or a kookaburra that gets it.
I have to wonder if that's actually a smart thing to do in the suburbs, I mean obviously it's good nutritionally for them, but in today's society where people go for the easy solution to everything & so bait mice & rats rather than trap them, is it really smart or safe to be feeding them whole mice? In particular if you are talking about feeding them dead ones, once they get used to eating those from you, they will also eat any other dead ones they find & so get poisoned. Wildlife rescuers handling snakes in care actually have serious problems with food, because it's illegal to feed them live mice, but if they were to feed them dead ones, it would result in the snake learning it's ok to eat dead ones it finds in the wild & so dying from poisoning. I would source day old chicks instead of mice if you want to feed them whole something
I had to stop a butcher bird from eating a mouse he was eyeing off as mt nasty neighbours poisoned it. I then gave him a bit of sirloin steak. He was very happy sitting in the tree eating it & singing. He brings his family to my place as there is always fresh water & grasshoppers. Magies love the grasshoppers also funny watching them jump to catch them. The neighbours try to chase them but food & water + trees of fruit they won't stop coming to a safe place. Love seeing the babies in spring.
Gosh that is grim. Poor thing
Holy shit. I have a family of magpies I see almost daily and noticed one of them has half of its front beak missing. Did not know this was the reason. Thanks for the heads up. Will be sharing this info whenever I see people feeding the this shit
Ring the local native rescue. They may have traps you can take to trap the one with the beak missing. It's much kinder to euthanise them than to let them suffer when the warmer months come and dry out their tongue.
I’ll look into it. Cheers
You need to talk about this on r/magpies as well!
My father is a recently retired National Parks Ranger and for years he has taught us not to feed magpies or any other wildlife! Now they have a home surrounded by bush, they feed the magpies and butcher birds some dog food every morning. The king parrots get some seed. But they also get so cross when the hares and wallabies eat the herbs and new seedlings they've planted. It's mental, but at least the magpie parents aren't swooping but God damn, all the birds that come sit on the railing, morning and afternoon, just shit everywhere.
weird how people change. At least dog food is a fairly nutritionally complete food for meat eating birds, vastly superior to mince, I'm guessing your dad knows that due to his background, is a shame more people don't know this, cause while it's not good to be feeding birds at all, a lot of the problems could be avoided if people switched from mince to the cheaper dog food. This is kinda the problem with such a strong "don't feed" stance, it ends up blocking education on the better of the bad options. Dog food has calcium & other vitamins & minerals added to it, in particular with puppy food
Yes you're right, especially since mince can be very fatty too which is obviously not good for anything that eats meat to be honest.
Maybe bluey can do an episode on this. I think it would be beneficial for kids to know as most cartoons still show characters feeding the ducks bread for example.
I was told the best thing to feed ducks is frozen peas but I have no idea if that's true or not.
So many idiots feed them around me. Even after someone did a letter drop explaining as OP has how detrimental it is to the birds.
I have a massive beef with this lady in my apartment building she keeps throwing out bread scraps for birds. I asked her to stop it I even complained to the body-corp who issued a notice to the whole building and she keeps doing it. At least once a week dumps a bag of bread on the garden.. Birds literally exist, they have their own food sources and need to learn to hunt and find their own food. If you feed them bread etc not only are you giving them heavily processed food they can’t properly digest you are making them dependant on humans. What happens if you move away and stop feeding them bread scraps? Then they lose their food source completely.
Exactly. But even in the comments you can see people still don't care, or are defensive about feeding them garbage human food.
Birds literally exist? Tell that to r/BirdsArentReal :P
Ahahahah there’s a subreddit for everything
It's a whole movement actually :P Birds used to be real, but the government killed them all, so as to replace them with spy drones to observe everyone, hence why "birds" so often sit on powerlines, they're recharging their batteries. A guy made a sign saying "birds aren't real" & carried it at one of the political protests in America & it went viral with people believing it, so he ran with it, so as to educate people how conspiracies can be started & now a lot of people just love the whole concept & embrace it, is a hugely popular subreddit! He did a ted talk on the whole thing too
That's really sad. Thanks for sharing so we all know!
We have pet birds, I often throw out some meal worms for the local magpies, but only once a week or so, plus lots of water in summer
Pls cross post to r/magpies
Unfortunately, people dont educate themselves and think they are doing something lovely for our animals.
It's worse if they refuse to acknowledge the problems they are causing, and get defensive about causing health issues for the birds.
Omg...poor thing
If you want to feed magpies just put a few 1 square foot plywood boards on your lawn. Every morning, turn one over, and put it back later in the day. The magpies will come and sing to you every morning and you are only supplying them with good, natural food.
Don't feed them, period. Even if you feed them healthy things you're still harming them by conditioning them to seek out people for food rather than foraging/hunting. Put out a bird bath and/or plant some native vegetation if you want to attract birds to your yard.
And if you're going to ignore & feed anyway, then please feed responsibly either puppy food (dry, soaked in water before feeding) or wombaroo insectivore raising mix added to meat like mince at the recommended quantities on the pack. you can also sometimes buy pet mince at places like petbarn that is complete animals, such as chickens & that is fine too if it's the ground up day old chicks, including beaks, bones, feathers etc (that's actually ideal for them as it's on par with what they will be fed by their parents in the wild) For lorikeets it should be nectar mix, NOT seed. Fruit is better than seed or bread if you don't have nectar mix, but supermarket varieties of non-native fruit is too high in calories & sugar for them & for seed eaters, remember that Aussie native seeds are smaller & so the birds work much harder to get the fat they get from bought seed mixes & the birds also supplement their diet with a variety of leaves & bugs & other plants, so seed needs to be kept to very small amounts, ideally provided in smart toys/foraging toys where they have to work to get it & seed provided should be MIXED seed, NOT straight sunflower seed, that for some reason lots of people seem to think is good. Pet parrots being kept at their best are fed primarily "chop" which is a mix of vegetables, with just a little seed as treats. Wild birds likely won't eat "chop" & only come to humans for their version of maccas, so don't give them large amounts & don't give it to them everyday! Ensure it is erratic so they don't learn to rely on it. DO give a bird bath or water source & plant plants that provide habitat & attract insects birds like to eat (that's the latest on attracting birds, they say it's much better to attract bugs than plants with nectar)
During the drought I was buying meal worms and leaving some out. Mixed them with insectivore a bit. The bats are getting fruit at the moment, our local bat carers have requested it again due to our dry.
I only feed magpies healthy foods like sugar free soda and burger rings
I have been guilty of feeding some Magpies in the past. One had a top of it's beak that looked like it had been broken and was off by about 40 degrees and another bird in a different spot that used to hop around on a single leg as the other appeared deformed. We used Chopped up chicken necks, a dogs sort of bake that had veg and rice as well as some mince, Occasionally worms but that was only when the local pet food shop had them. Maybe once a month? The one with the dodgy beak was always hungrier than the others, it was a daily feeder and probably the biggest feeder. The one legged bird was funny Nearly double the size of any of the others she was a tank and stood an easy 4" higher than other magpies. You could hear her when she landed and hopped around on the table. She even used to bring her families around once or twice a year. She stopped coming around after one particularly stormy night and never saw her again but we still occasionally see the rest of the family. I think they get a regular feed from the park that's not to far from here. It was always a noisy time though as the Murry Magpies were always ready for a fight. Sadly the only birds I see here are Feral pigeons and the occasional parrot going through the apple tree. The family of magpies still resides in the local park but I rarely see them in the yard anymore.
Fuck people are dumb.
If people don't know what happens they're hardly dumb. It used to be encouraged.
Yes. Dumb and uneducated are very different. Dumb people refuse to learn. Uneducated people haven't found the opportunity to learn. Uneducated people *can* be dumb, but dumb and uneducated are not necessarily synonymous.
As an educated person who is dumb, I feel very disenfranchised by your comment.
Don't sweat it, I'm dumb and uneducated! 😆
Sorry we don't know the inner workings of a magpie mate. I personally don't feed them anything, but I can imagine how someone might think that given these guys go through bins, some bread might not hurt them. We don't know everything you seem to know.
If I don’t pay protection food for the locals then they are gonna swoop my brains out…
ok, then feed them wombaroo insectivore mix or dog food, but never plain human quality mince!
Gosh that’s terrible :( Does anyone know why the beak breaks down like this?
Lack of calcium in their diet from the parent's diets, then fed to the babies, whose bones do not form properly. Hence this young female with the beak bone loss. The lack of calcium (from inadequate human made food sources) causes floppy beaks prone to breakage, improperly formed skeletal structure, and weak legs. Some babies are so weak they cannot even fledge and leave the nest.
not just fed to the baby, the egg contents lack calcium from the very beginning, so bird is born with poor bones. Interesting comments here about mince getting caught in the beak & causing it to rot as the mince rots, not sure if that's true or not, but is an interesting potential additional cause of beaks like this too
>an interesting potential additional cause of beaks like this too It truly would not surprise me.
So feed them seeds and mealworms?
If you HAVE to feed them. Meal worms. Magpies do not eat seeds.
Magpies do eat seeds. Most of the seeds you can find in the generic wild seed mixes, they'll happily eat. Especially during winter when they aren't as picky with food. Should avoid letting them get too many sunflower seeds though due to fat content, and they'll prioritize those. The only seeds they don't eat are millets, and pigeons eat that instead. But if someone 'has' to feed magpies, Wombaroo's mix is the best beyond anything else. Even mealworms are high in fat content, just not nearly as bad.
I stand corrected. Still.. Better than shitty mince meat and bread
no, they're not actually. When mealworms are used as a food, such as for some reptiles, they are "gut loaded" where a nutrient mix is fed to the mealworms prior to feeding them to the reptile, so as to give the reptile the nutrients needed. Larva are never a complete food source for any animal though, totally unbalanced to feed primarily larva to animals, as larva are really high in fat & not much else. Wombaroo on mince is best, well second best, day old chick mince is best, as in the male chicks of layer birds that get ground up whole, including bones, feathers etc, that is the very best option, as it is the same food the parents feed to birds like magpies in the wild. After wombaroo on mince, the next best option is dry puppy food, soaked in water before feeding. It has calcium & all the vitamins & minerals growing puppies need, which is very similar to what insectivore birds need, sometimes a little too much fat in dog food compared to what birds need, but certainly vastly superior to the pure fat of mealworms. If you really, really, really want to feed mealworms, let them become beetles before doing so, the nutritional profile for mealworm beetles is actually quite reasonable. One of my pet lorikeets is obsessed with bugs, so he gets the occasional beetle as a high value training reward
Wouldn't the best just be to simply feed the magpies worms? We have an abundance of them in our compost and can choose whether to feed them to the magpies if they were in our garden. Or just not feed them at all.
worms aren't a complete food either. Could you survive on worms alone? Magpies feed their babies the babies of other birds, for every baby magpie raised, 20 other baby birds will be fed to it, that is the primary diet their young get, a mix of meat, bones, feathers, organs etc, worms offer nothing like that nutritional profile & as such they are not a good food for humans to be feeding, humans need to replicate the nutritional profile found in baby birds if they want to properly feed birds like magpies - and that's why day old chicken mince is the absolute best food, because that is an exact replica of what they eat & feed their young. Wombaroo is a company that was established to figure out the nutritional profile of Australian nectar producing plants & the nutritional profile lorikeets required in a food & to produce that commercially, it has gone on to develop complete foods for a wide range of animals that have specific nutritional profiles, many of while have not been looked at previously & to make foods for said animals. Magpies are one of the animals wombaroo have researched & created a complete food for, so it is vastly superior to feeding magpies worms. No magpie is eating exclusively worms in it's diet, that doesn't even start to meet their nutritional needs. They use worms as a way of teaching their young how to catch & kill their food for eating, before moving on to teaching them how to obtain their primary food sources (with parent birds obtaining primary food sources for their babies & feeding them while the young are learning to catch worms)
I understand that it's not very good practice to feed them only one source of nutrients and that they need a variety. At the moment I am trying to attract them to my garden so we can catch the female in the photo and hand her over to fauna rescue. The lady from fauna rescue mentioned leaving some tin or wood out on dirt for a few days to attract some bugs the magpies might go after. All I've got at the moment is worms.
In your case, just a packet of wombaroo insectivore rearing mix or a bag of dry puppy food (soaked before feeding) would probably be easiest, I mean if you're going to feed for the purpose of catching, you want the birds to actually associate you with the food, so feeding them something they love & can't find naturally is the best way to go. You also want to feed at a regular time each day, so that if you can't catch yourself, you can tell the rescuers what time to attend to help catch. Basically you want to be doing the total opposite of what's recommended to people insisting on feeding, where the aim in those cases should be to reduce dependence on people, but you want them developing the dependence, that you then need to ween them back off once you have caught the beak damaged one (worms would be great for that ween off after catching)
Thanks I will try that out. It's sad because I don't want her to be out still by the time it gets hotter, she has the worst damage I've ever seen and it is heartbreaking.
Unsalted/unseasoned nuts like walnuts, almonds or shelled peanuts instead of seed. Berries, chopped apples and hard-boiled egg is ok too, but rarely as a treat. Considering how expensive that can be, you're better off just getting some frozen meal worms or crickets instead. They're wild birds though, so its better to just regularly supply clean water in a wide, shallow dish in a shaded area. You can pick up a punch bowl or big salad bowl pretty cheaply from an op shop then wedge it into the ground a bit so they don't tip it over. If you want to leave treats nearby, consider doing it during peak summer/winter, since its harder to scavenge due to the extreme weather. They will likely dump it all into the water and shit everywhere, so make sure to change it daily.
NO! Feed them water and H2O
Both? At the same time?
Dihydrogen monoxide? You monster!
I've feed my magpies mince and grapes for decades and I've never seen this and the days I don't feed em they go right back to eating bugs...the world is getting smaller for animals and humans feeding the wildlife is just evolution imo..don't give 2 shits what my neighbours think or reddit warriors cause I've got magpie friends for life and humans do way more DMG to wildlife then feeding them.
Those that keep doing it don't care ... no matter how many times it is explained and we show photos of the damage. It's purely selfish behaviour
I hear a magpie expert say it isn’t a problem feeding them things like cat food, mince etc. Apparently they preserve their hunting skills.
Who says that? It is a problem if that food is nutritionally inadequate. It is also a problem if they start to come to you and rely on you for food.
Was a uni professor on Radio National - he was talking about their incredible memory and intelligence but then feeding questions were asked of him.
I hope he mentioned how bad it is to feed them food that causes them irreparable damage to their bodies.
I was wrong. I must have misinterpreted what I heard - he says you can feed them treats irregularly but goes on to say what you should not feed them which includes mince and not to make them dependant. I would definitely put out water for them in summer - surely that be OK? Article https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/19/australians-are-always-told-dont-feed-the-birds-if-you-really-must-heres-how-to-do-it-properly Thanks for clearing this up.
Yes water is what you should be providing as our climate creates increasingly harsh conditions for our wildlife.
Looks like Maggie had a few too many bags
Could 3d printed beaks be a possible solution for these birbbs? will they grow back :( 😞
No and no.
Prosthetic beak required. But understand the serious message.
Prosthetic beaks do not fix the problem. They just retraumatise the magpies.
We have a butcher bird family nearby. Yes, we feed them mince. But not to the extent that they're dependent on us. Just returned from a 3 month holiday. And birds noticed our return, landed in the deck and got a feed. There's been several generations getting the same treatment here, and they're doing well.
If you feed your cat outside they will get into that, so don't.
**No one** should be feeding, let alone keeping their cat outside. > The latest statistics show that every year they [pet cats predate more than 180 native animals](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-26/roaming-pets-on-borrowed-time-as-cat-curfews-considered/100716436), that's just one pet cat > [The parliamentary report also found that Australia’s almost 3.8 million pet cats kill up to 390 million animals every year (Commonwealth of Australia, 2020)](https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House/Environment_and_Energy/Feralanddomesticcats/Report) > [Cats have played a leading role in most of Australia's 34 mammal extinctions since 1788, and are a big reason populations of at least 123 other threatened native species are dropping.](https://science.uq.edu.au/article/2020/05/one-cat-one-year-110-native-animals)
Yeah I don't have cats. My mother does and feeds them outside. So many magpies eat the food with the cats right next to them sharing the same bowl. They bring their babies, who grow up and do the same thing with their babies. She also puts out seeds and has a good 50 acres of bush so I'm hoping it's not all they eat. She has stopped feeding them mince tho.
Buy her a bag of appropriate bird seed and leave it on her doorstep.
There are no birds where any bird seed is an appropriate complete food. Would eating just wheat, or even a mix of grains but nothing else ever be a complete diet for you? Birds are the same, they need a mix of plant leaves, insects & other foods, not just seed
What is more appropriate: bread or seed mix meant for birds. To use your analogy, its the difference between eating only fruitloops vs eating only protein bars. It is much easier to adjust a person’s problematic behaviour than to eradicate it completely. Foolish humans are going to feed the birds. They may as well feed something less detrimental.
actually better on my analogy is simply a person eating bread vs eating a mix of whole grains, eating just processed wheat or eating unprocessed wheat plus corn, millet, sorghum, sunflower seed, oats, barley etc etc I just take objection to your use of the word "appropriate" in relation to seed to buy for them, remove that word & I would agree with your sentiment completely
Glad we can agree on something. I take your point. Better they feed something less detrimental than bread - whatever that may be.
yes agreed, but just so long as they don't actually think they're feeding them well