R had to go into Stratford early this morning to pick up his new car, and I went along too, dipping out of the bit where the salesman talked him through every knob and button and lever and safety feature to go churchyard birding, but meeting up with him later for coffee and cake. It’s a bit early in the season for the churchyard birds to be impressed with my edible bribes – there are still plenty of invertebrates for them to hunt in the trees and bushes, and obviously it’s better that they should feed themselves when they can – but over a couple of hours a small scattering of ground food and a lot of patience eventually earned me a list of twenty species.
On a day when I managed to track a little gang of Goldcrests around the churchyard, and photograph them feeding in several different places, only something pretty special was going to bounce them off the top of the podium – and this is it. We all know that Magpies aren’t just black and white birds – the royal blue colour of their flight feathers is easily seen – but the fact that those blue feathers shade through to green (what is that? Sea green? Paris green? Persian green? Jade?) lifts them to another plane. And that’s before you get to the tail, which is… ridiculous. It’s like a menu wrought in colour: asparagus, flavoured with Chartreuse, progressing through blood orange, grape and aubergine, and finally arriving at Teal (which I wouldn’t eat myself, though people do, but as a colour is simply the best, if only because it’s my signature shade). And all that colour reflecting silkily off a surface that looks like dupion.
In my opinion, the Magpie is the Paris couture of corvids.
