Magpie Mother


I loved Buggles from the moment he was handed to me by a farmer who’d found him in the grass. He was just feathering up, a fuzz of grey fluff still sprouting from under new plumes. His wing appeared broken and his foot twisted. I assume that on his first flight from the nest, he crash-landed, let down by his twisted foot. I had a taliped foot when I was born, a condition which often required children to wear irons to correct the bone growth. My mother did four-hourly exercises on my foot for months, then daily for years to save me from wearing irons. I mothered this bird with all the love she bestowed on me. I have rescued baby birds before, but often in the first few days they die from their injuries or shock. After a week, when Buggles’s loud and ravenous little triangle beak kept opening, swallowing and shrieking for more, I knew he was a survivor.

Wambaroo mix (available at pet shops and vets) was his baby-formula and he took to it served on the end of a wooden ice-cream stick. Soon, like a toddler in a highchair, Buggles began to play food games, flicking his head from side to side and splattering the walls with grey Wambaroo paste, or holding the feeding stick in his beak and shaking his head if I tried to take it. Later his favourite sport was ‘killing the stick’: after a game of tug of war, I’d let him keep the stick and he’d delight in bashing it onto the sink as though it were a lizard or insect.

One night in my study, he appeared to fall off my computer into the gap behind. I thought something scared him, but he emerged with a huntsman spider wriggling its legs from his beak. A quick bash on the printer, and Buggles enjoyed his meal leg by leg, saving the plump belly until last. I’m an arachnophobe, so he rose to hero status after that.

A New Age magpie, Buggles enjoyed technology. He watched TV perched on a towel on the couch; he imitated the ring tone of my phone, but most of all he liked computers. Most evenings he’d join me as I wrote in my study. I’d put some newspaper on the printer and he’d sit at eye level talking to me. What a good vocabulary he had, from the definite questions in low tones, to the excited garbles as he learned to warble. Like a teenager, he looked surprised when his voice first broke. He could also make loud beak-snapping noises at people he didn’t like, but the most piercing sound of all was his call for food. My favourite sound was the sweet, gentle chatter as he spoke to me in private at night. I would, of course, reply and I told him secrets that no one else knew.

Jealous of my writing, he’d often grab and ‘kill’ the pen until I stopped writing and played with him. He loved it when I typed, liked the hum of the computer and the clicking of the keys. He’d twist his head so he could see the screen and chase the cursor with his beak. He’d warble and talk and sometimes we’d play whistling games. He would put his head to one side and listen to my tune, then try to copy it. Most of all he liked classical music. He’d sing along, imitating the patterns and pitch.

Sadly, Buggles never learnt to fly, yet for a small flightless bird, he had attitude (and probably would have hated me for calling him such a wimpy name). There were certain people who Buggles could not tolerate, and he posed a serious threat to their ankles. He terrorised the cat and chased the chickens, but most of all he hated my nephew Alex. He would snap his beak, flap his wings and lunge as Alex approached. It shows that magpies have good memories, because when Bubbles was an impressionable teenager, Alex came to stay and enjoyed feeding Buggles, but Alex always like to win the game of ‘kill the stick’ and wouldn’t let Buggles take it. He even teased Buggles, waving the pop-stick and laughing. The scars on Alex’s ankles show Buggles’s revenge.

I didn’t know Buggles was a ‘he’ until he got older and developed that distinctive male magpie marking on the back of this head – a straight line where the black and white join. Buggles was a farmer. He tilled the soil and eradicated pests. When I brought pot-plants in for the young bird to peck at, he promptly began to mine the soil for worms and grubs. He kept my children’s bug Catcher in use with an insatiable appetite for worms, spiders and beetles. I began to give him small amounts of corm and meat, but his favourite foods were grapes and spaghetti. He’d go crazy when I returned from shopping, if he could see grapes. I’d hold a grape and move it from side to side and he’d perform a dance, moving his head and shoulders with the grape. Of course he always got a juicy reward. As for spaghetti, well I bet he never remembered worms that size when he was in the nest! He liked ‘killing’ the spaghetti too. His main perch was on my skink, where spills could be easily wiped. He loved water and played with the water from the tap.

I first realised how much Buggles liked water when I replaced his small drinking bowl with a larger one. This little ball of fluff and broken feathers began to roll and squawk and tumble around. He soon got a swimming pool in the form of a baking tray and spent many hours playing water sports, flicking water under every feather until he resembled a skinny, drowned rat. I towel-dried him when he was young, but later he liked to sit on the window sill in the sunlight and preen his wet feathers.

His foot never improved, but he learned to walk in a hop-jump-flap fashion. He could fly down from a chair but couldn’t fly upwards. There is now doubt that this bird was the love of my life. Even my children were envious at our close relationship! He was the cleverest pet I’d ever had, with his playful personality and his human-like conversations. He had beautiful velvety-brown eyes, with a cheeky sparkle.

As Buggles grew, I began to let him outside the house during the day, but always locked him in at night. He followed me, or the chickens around the garden, as he foraged for food. He interacted with the chooks and could crow and cluck but he avoided the geese. He was no match, however, for the fox that came prowling for chickens and found poor Buggles alone on the driveway. I never heard anything. Later, after a hen went missing in the daytime, I realised his fate. A couple of months later, I found his little spine stripped of flesh, his skull and beak still attached. I hated myself for not protecting him. I even thought I should have kept him safely in a cage, but when I remembered all those frolics he enjoyed in the garden, I decided that a short full life is better than a long, caged one. He was two years old. He was my friend.

Jude Aquilina, 2007 (1,242 words)

Author: Jude Aquilina
Country: Australia
True story: Yes
Rating: 4 paws up
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