We’re approaching the danger point. As winter gives way to spring, every Australian starts looking up, warily cataloguing flashes of black and white among the branches of trees.
As magpie-nesting season begins in earnest, plans are hatched to stave off attacks from the territorial birds. Some of us will share morsels of minced meat with them to try to earn safe passage, convinced the birds have long memories and it’s possible to endear ourselves to them. School kids start carrying long sticks, hoping a few seconds of defensive flailing will grant them time for a getaway. Because we all know what could happen if the sound of wings rings too close in our ears at this time of year.
For radio broadcaster Lauren Taylor, a morning dog walk in Melbourne turned bloody last year when, out of her peripheral vision, came a black-and-white blur. Then a nesting magpie latched onto her face. “I wasn’t sure if it was the beak or its claws that popped into my eye,” Taylor recalls. “I had to physically grab it, while it was attached to my eye, and pull it off. I looked down and it was like … the jelly of my eyeball [on the ground]. I got myself to the eye h
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