MAGPIE: a neighbour's pet killed by a spot of DIY wizardry

HIGHLY visible in his black and white plumage, the magpie sparks terror in the hedgerow among vulnerable nesting birds.

Equipped with a pickaxe beak and keen intelligence, this voracious predator has been blamed in part for the steady decline of many of our songbird species whose chicks are snatched from their nests.

I have watched a magpie return again and again to a sparrow's nest until every last helpless chick is either devoured on the spot or carried away struggling in that deadly beak.

It's grisly stuff but magpies have a right to eat like the rest of us and are, in fact, omnivorous, choosing seeds, berries, and fruit when meat is in short supply.

There are definitely more magpies about these days and it is frequently possible to make inroads into that magpie-counting rhyme:"One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told..."

I'm not sure what comes next, or if anything does, but I've certainly seen five magpies together at once recently.

Unluckily for smaller birds, magpies tend to stay rooted in the same general territory and will comb local trees and hedgerows remorselessly for chicks and eggs during the breeding season.

Magpie nests are constructed of twigs arranged in a large dome shape and lined with soft grass and soil.

When the boot is on the other foot and their own young are threatened, magpies can be very brave in defence.

I myself have seen a lone female drive away two menacing crows.

Magpies are actually part of the crow family but at just 250 grammes full-grown are much leaner and smaller than, say, the rook or carrion crow.

However, they are still bigger than their more colourful cousin, the jay. There doesn't seem to be much love lost between any of these 'relatives' but I've observed the natural animosity between magpies and jays at first hand.

When I was a child, we used to live next door to an accident-prone family, one of whose sons tried to raise a young magpie as a pet.

Not to be outdone, my older brother acquired a jay and these two birds would threaten and insult each other all day over the garden fence.

In the wild, the weaker jay would be driven off with a nasty peck for its impudence.

The jay didn't live long, proving the folly of taking birds from the wild.

Not surprisingly, the magpie's death wasn't far behind either.

An earlier attempt by our neighbour's boy to build a complex home for his pet mice failed when they suffocated. (He'd forgotten air holes.)

The death of the magpie involved more DIY wizardry.

It had probably seemed a good idea at the time to nail a razor-sharp piece of metal vertically down a back door to keep out draughts.

That was until the wind blew the door shut on the magpie, almost cutting it in half.

Some time after, the boy's mother herself fell foul of the same device when it sliced off a finger.

She grimly carried the severed digit to hospital in a plastic bag where it was successfully reattached.

I always think of her when anyone uses the phrase: "the fickle finger of fate".