Eurasian Magpie
Channel: Bent Lorentzen
Date: 2014-11-26

On Friday night, Nov. 22, around 2:30 AM in a freezing rain, this Eurasian Magpie appeared first like garbage, then like a lifeless heap of feathers in the middle of the bicycle pavement of one of Copenhagen’s busiest arteries (a couple of blocks from my Husum township home).   My thought was that he’d been hit by a car and thrown to the elevated bicycle partition of the thoroughfare.  Any wandering neighborhood cat or roving red fox (I’ve seen quite a few of them, like ghosts in the night) would have easily gobbled him up, which is nature doing its thing. When I approached, it surprisingly jumped a few feet to the sidewalk, before again collapsing.  It had not even attempted to extend his wings into flight.  I debated for a few moments about what to do, and saw that even though this was an inconvenience to my depressed state of mind, I would go against my nature and knowledge of birds to not step in and care for him as best as possible.  The past couple of months have been a difficult period of time for me, and I was doing a disciplined walking meditation towards a nearby wetlands wilderness preserve.  
So I mindfully put myself into the bird’s POV, and knew that if I were this bird, I would appreciate an intelligent helping hand, at least to ease my suffering -- get me out of this wet cold -- were I dying.    In my life, I’ve had several hundred birds in my hands, going way back to before my undergraduate biology years as a research assistant to my ornithology professor-advisor.  He’d hired me summers to help him with his DDT research and the banding of birds at his wilderness lab back in the early 1970’s.  I’ve successfully rehabilitated many birds, including members of this highly intelligent family of birds… a Corvidae, which includes jays, crows, ravens etc..  

 I easily scooped him up where he lay now on the sidewalk, he screamed twice before going limp in my hands, and took him home.  Singing lullabies to him (bird brains respond well to that, helping in the secretion of calming neurohormones), I put him into a cat carrier with leaves and branches, set some water there, and placed him next to a warm radiator.  I didn’t expect him to survive into the day.

This 1-minute video shows what happened the day after.  

Once he has relaxed to my touch and gained more strength, I will take him to a wildlife veterinarian for a comprehensive.  He has an abrasion on the scalp, a wing is drooping, and now 4 days later, he is still relatively very weak.  My plan is to release him this coming Spring, if he can fly.  My concern is that this could be Freddie, the flightless magpie.  He’d been attacked as a fledgling near where I live by a predator, and who, to the many observations that I’ve shared with all of you for a year and a half, has adapted well to becoming a street wise magpie, despite having been subsequently attacked several times, flight feathers being ripped out, only to grow out again due to undamaged stem cells.  I can’t tell yet, and will know better if I no longer see Freddie by the Husum town plaza, where he forages most mornings.

He perks right up when I sing or talk softly to him as a beloved equal.  Even though he hasn’t a clue what I’m saying, using my natural voice is exactly the right way to be with such a bird.  Also closing my eyes, when singing and such, and then looking directly more and more.  And I feed good music into his room, from the central stereo system I’ve installed in my home.  All that and much else I am doing transmit good and trusting signals to this bird.

The image contrast of the video is poor, as I did not want to shine any light into the bird.