What happened to the magpies?

A pair of magpies visited the garden most days throughout the summer. They ate the sunflower seeds distributed by the goldfinches feeding messily at the bird feeder. They also showed a bold intelligence by venturing into the house, when the kitchen door was open, to take kibble from the dog’s bowl. They were extremely cautious and would only risk this if the kitchen was empty; but often they would announce themselves loudly while entering the house – perhaps as a means of flushing out any nearby humans or dogs.

Working upstairs, this became a familiar set of sounds – a squawking announcement from downstairs, followed by the rattle of the metal dog bowl as they collected beakfuls of dried dog food, before hopping back out to safety.

They spent so much time in the garden that it became a problem at times – they would crap on clothes drying outside on the clothes line, or on the handle of the kitchen door, when perching there to check for safe passage to a free lunch.

In the last month or so they have been largely absent. Perhaps it was a mother and child, and the visits were to provide nourishment to the growing offspring. I’m still hopeful that they will come back again.

I set up a remote camera to capture their kitchen visits.

I spent quite a long time experimenting with SVG animations in an attempt to convert this video into a small-size format, as part of my attempts to keep this website fast-to-load and low in energy consumption. It turned out that converting to a standard compressed video format resulted in a much smaller file size than any of the alternatives. Perhaps a compressed video capture of an SVG animation would be smaller still? I will try that next.