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Talkback: Magpies and mice
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Reply to magpie-haters: I understand people not liking these birds. I'm protected from a lot of this dislike because I have cats that do their own fair share of song-bird destruction and in London I think the magpies are mainly scavengers rather than predators. We also get a lot of crows, and it is these, I think, that keep dropping chicken bones in the gutters. I recently saw crow-hate taking to an extreme. A dead one is now strung up by its feet on one of the neighbouring allotments. I was always told by my father that gamekeepers strung up their kills on the fence for two reasons, one to show their employer that they had been working well, and two, to frighten off other 'vermin'. Until last Sunday I had not seen such a display gibbet for 30 years.
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All you have to do is paint a picture of an owl on a piece of MDF and nail it to a branch in the tree. Pigeons ain't that bright. At least that's the theory. I'm not sure where I dredged this idea up from...perhaps 1950s children's encyclopedia or maybe one of my daughters was ranting on about how shtooopid pigeons are. It's worth a try. The kids have a little play house in the garden. We called it owl cottage after my pathetic attempt at painting such a cut-out. We never have pigeons sitting on it. But maybe that's because the cats see them off.