Magpies

[Hugh Kingery]

We haven't seen or heard any magpies for several months. Have they gone somewhere else to breed & play?

Hugh Kingery -- Franktown

[Courtney R]

I observed over 105 at cherry creek state park on Friday 8/9/24 (105 was my count for a frozen video frame that only captured a portion of the group). It was quite a sight! Here’s the video (iPhone). 

[elena]

On a sunset walk on the Bobolink Trail (Boulder County near the East Boulder Rec Center) there were about a dozen flying and calling over a field north of the Rec Center yesterday. There was also only one common nighthawk. 

Sent from my iPhone

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On Aug 11, 2024, at 6:27 PM, Courtney R <dr.ca...@gmail.com> wrote:



I observed over 105 at cherry creek state park on Friday 8/9/24 (105 was my count for a frozen video frame that only captured a portion of the group). It was quite a sight! Here’s the video (iPhone). 

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<Video.mov>

Thank you,

Courtney

Courtney Rella, PhD

dr.ca...@gmail.com

On Aug 11, 2024, at 17:58, 'Hugh Kingery' via Colorado Birds <cob...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

We haven't seen or heard any magpies for several months. Have they gone somewhere else to breed & play?

Hugh Kingery -- Franktown

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[meredith]

Hugh,

If you still lived in the Congress Park area of Denver, you would have plenty of them.  They have been in my backyard and the green areas around East High School in large numbers all summer.  

Meredith McBurney - Congress Park, Denver

[David Suddjian]

"Normal" magpie numbers were in the Ken Caryl Valley area for the 2024 nesting season. Fairly low numbers are here now though, but that is typical after nesting has concluded here, when many vacate the area for a time and then they return in numbers by the end of summer.

David Suddjian

Ken Caryl Valley, Littleton CO

On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 5:58 PM 'Hugh Kingery' via Colorado Birds <cob...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

We haven't seen or heard any magpies for several months. Have they gone somewhere else to breed & play?

Hugh Kingery -- Franktown

[Peggy Gonder]

We had a colony nesting behind our back fence this spring and early summer.  I counted 18 one evening flying into roost in Hyland Greens of Westminster (north of 98th Ave east of  Sheridan.)  I'm still seeing young ones (shorter tail) and adults, but not in those numbers  in the 'hood recently.

Peggy Gonder

Westminster, CO

On Sunday, August 11, 2024 at 5:58:16 PM UTC-6 Hugh Kingery wrote:

[dty...@gmail.com]

FWIW, I live in Breckenridge and over the last few years I’ve been seeing more at the higher elevations.

 

Debbie Tyber

Breckenridge

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[Susanna Donato]

There were 25-50 (I was unsure if I was seeing all the same birds or not) at Kelly Reservoir/Lowry (East Denver) on Friday or Saturday evening. They just kept flying out of the trees -- going back and forth with a large group (30ish) of starlings. 

[kevyg...@aol.com]

Hello Hugh et al,

 

   We had a bonanza fledge of magpies this past Spring in my little townhouse community along Little Dry Creek about 1/4 mile northwest of the intersection of Holly Street & Arapahoe Road in west Centennial.  One day about 6 weeks ago I counted ~ 27 on a postage-stamp patch of lawn across the cul de sac from my home while hearing mobs/murders/mischiefs (what is the most appropriate title for a group of magpies?) chattering from several other directions at the same time.  Around this time last year I posted about a similar occurrence.

   Luckily for the Red-tailed Hawks who fledged 3 juveniles into the neighborhood, and everyone else who the magpies would harass and bully, and my suet feeders that were getting annihilated in a matter of hours, the magpies have dispersed so we now are back to just a few here and there.  Neighborhood's a lot quieter, too.

  Two other aspects of these population explosions I wonder about are: 'Where are they all nesting?' and 'Why do they congregate in such large flocks after fledging?'

   

Keep Smilin',

Kevin Corwin

west Centennial

 

Sent from my Remington Rand Typewriter via my Rotary Dial Wall Phone

 

 

In a message dated 8/12/2024 2:20:47 AM Mountain Daylight Time, cob...@googlegroups.com writes:

 

cob...@googlegroups.com

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• Magpies - 2 Updates

Magpies

Hugh Kingery <ouz...@aol.com>: Aug 11 11:58PM

We haven't seen or heard any magpies for several months. Have they gone somewhere else to breed & play?   Hugh Kingery -- Franktown

Courtney R <dr.ca...@gmail.com>: Aug 11 06:27PM -0600

Thank you,   Courtney   Courtney Rella, PhD   dr.ca...@gmail.com

On Aug 11, 2024, at 17:58, 'Hugh Kingery' via Colorado Birds <cob...@googlegroups.com> wrote:   We haven't seen or heard any magpies for several months. Have they gone somewhere else to breed & play?   Hugh Kingery -- Franktown   --   --   You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group.   To post to this group, send email to cob...@googlegroups.com   For more options, visit this group at   http://groups.google.com/group/cobirds   * All posts should be signed with the poster's full name and city. Include bird species and location in the subject line when appropriate.   * Join Colorado Field Ornithologists https://cobirds.org/membership/   ---   You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group.   To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to cobirds+u...@googlegroups.com.

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[Hugh Kingery]

They showed up this morning in big numbers. We counted 36 magpies -- after not seeing any for a while.

Hugh

[Charlie Chase]

Warm afternoon at the Arsenal.   Had a small group of 8 Magpies feeding on and around the Bison lounging at the Arsenal.  As a bull was rolling the Magpies sitting on him simply adjusted to stay on whatever side was up.  In the larger herd were about 350 starlings also feeding on and around the resting herd.  No birds in the image below-that picture was useless.

Charlie

Denver

On Wed, Aug 14, 2024 at 5:15 PM 'Hugh Kingery' via Colorado Birds <cob...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

They showed up this morning in big numbers. We counted 36 magpies -- after not seeing any for a while.

Hugh

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[Jared Del Rosso]

As common as they and as much as most long-time CO residents shrug off magpies, posts about them never fail to generate the greatest number of genuinely interested replies!

Not much for me to add beyond this observation about us birders and the wonder that magpies seem to inspire in us. Around western Centennial, they seem to start forming roving flocks over the summer. It's neat. Blue Jays seem to do this, too. While I haven't made special note of these in eBird, a few weeks ago, I spotted nearly a dozen magpies on top of a storefront in Streets of Southglenn. A flock of nearly the same number of Blue Jays moved through my yard a few weeks ago. 

- Jared Del Rosso

Centennial, CO

[Patrick O'Driscoll]

This might be in the category of obvious, but the robust Black-billed Magpie population in Denver City Park (well more than a dozen active nests each spring/summer) appears to flock up in mid-late summer once the fledglings are able to forage on their own.

Then most of  the magpies appear to disappear for a couple of weeks -- probably into surrounding neighborhoods, including City Park West and even as far east as my house in Denver's Hale neighborhood, a mile away as the magpie flies. I've seen them swarm down the block, picking through lawns, shrubbery, trees as they go.

Yesterday, a flock of at least 32 showed up on the east side of City Park, moving through park lawns and a recovering patch of wild grass inside the fenced-off construction site of the park's new "Nature Play" area. It was built (opening this fall) in good bird habitat east of the Ferril Lake playground and below the SW corner of the Museum of Nature + Science. Fingers are crossed that the habitat may recover yet with the return of regularly flowing water in a man-made "creek" that winds down down through it.

A nice spot for magpies and everything else . . .  

Patrick O'Driscoll

Denver

 

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[Judd Patterson]

I'll chime in on the overall topic of Black-billed Magpie in Colorado. I've pondered how I typically see magpies when I'm down in the Denver metro (in parks and neighborhoods), while they are relatively unusual, and almost always high flyovers, where I live in Fort Collins. So I dug in on the eBird Science pages and learned several interesting tidbits based on eBird data from 2008-2022: https://science.ebird.org/en/status-and-trends/species/bkbmag1/abundance-map?week=1

• The mean relative abundance across the entire state is 0.6 (this estimates how many magpie an expert eBirder would detect on a 1 hour, 2 kilometer traveling checklist at the optimal time of day).
• Most of central Fort Collins, Loveland, Longmont, and Pueblo have relative abundance values of 0.
• Most of Boulder, Denver, and Colorado Springs have relative abundance values between 1 and 3.

In the "magpie deserts" the situation is not really uniform, and relative abundance increases rapidly as you move just a bit up into the foothills and sometimes as you move east. I'm not really sure of the reasons behind these differences, or if some have experienced these changes firsthand (e.g. either magpie declining in Fort Collins or arriving in Denver) but overall the data paints a picture of slow decline across the state. Cornell estimates a statewide magpie abundance decline of approximately 9% between 2011-2021.

Thanks for the fun magpie discussion and the chance to dig in on what we can learn when talented scientists tap into all the data we submit. Don't forget the "common" species on your checklists!

-Judd

Fort Collins, CO

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[Scott Rashid]

In Estes, when nestling magpies fledge their nests, the parents seem to stay with them for a few weeks, then the parents leave the area and the young birds create a "gang" that maraude the area.  They move through the neighborhood seemingly teaching each other what to feed upon and where food is.  In October, sometimes September,  the adults return, then both adults and juveniles flock together to create large groups and work together to find food and cover to survive the winter.

This has been noticed because I have banded most, if not all the magpies in my neighborhood, and have been doing it since 1999.  Most of the magpies within a mile of my property are banded. Yet all the magpies that I see that are more than a mile from my property are unbanded.  (The past few years, I have missed banding a handful of magpies.)

Just my observations,

Scott Rashid

Estes Park

 

On Sun, Aug 18, 2024 at 7:37 AM Patrick O'Driscoll <pato...@gmail.com> wrote:

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