This question has two famous answers and neither one is about what you think.
The first is a mirror experiment, and a mirror is not a person. The second is about a bird that lives in Australia, is not the bird in the mirror study, and is not the bird in North America either. The three of them share a name and very little else.
The short answer
- If you mean the European magpie
- The famous study put a mark on its own throat and gave it a mirror. That is self recognition, and it is a different question from recognizing you
- If you mean the Australian magpie
- The claim that it knows individual people for years is widely made by people who study it. What we could open does not attach numbers to it
- If you mean the bird in your yard in the United States
- That is the Black-billed Magpie, a western bird, and we could not find a human recognition study on it at all
- The useful part
- Almost everything written under this question is quietly swapping one of these three birds for another
Three different birds, one name
- European magpie
- Pica pica. A corvid, related to crows and ravens. This is the bird in the mirror study
- Australian magpie
- Gymnorhina tibicen. The Australian Museum places it in the family Artamidae, not with the crows and not with the European magpie. This is the bird in the friendship stories and the swooping stories
- Black-billed Magpie
- The magpie of western North America, and a corvid. This is the bird an American reader is most likely to actually see
- Why it matters here
- A result found in one of them is not a result about the others. We are going to keep them apart for the whole article
The mirror study, in full
Helmut Prior, Ariane Schwarz and Onur Guentuerkuen published this in 2008. It is the study everyone means when they say magpies are self aware.
- The birds
- Five adult hand raised European magpies
- The test
- A colored mark, yellow or red, placed on the bird's own throat where it can only be seen in a mirror
- Control one
- A black mark, invisible against black throat feathers. This rules out the bird reacting to being handled or to feeling something on its throat
- Control two
- The mirror replaced with a nonreflective gray plate. This rules out the bird reacting to the mark rather than to the reflection
- The result
- Mark directed behavior was significantly higher in the colored mark plus mirror condition, and it stopped as soon as the bird had removed the mark
Two out of five
Five birds took part. Two of them, named Gerti and Goldie in the paper, showed statistically significant mark directed behavior.
Two out of five is not a failure and it is not a headline either. It is what a first demonstration of something difficult usually looks like, and the honest way to carry it is to say that some magpies did this, under these conditions, in this lab.
The reason it mattered so much at the time is that until then the mirror mark test had only been passed by great apes, dolphins and elephants, all of them mammals with a very different brain layout. A bird passing it at all was the finding.
And none of that is about you
A mirror test asks whether an animal understands that the thing in the glass is itself. It says nothing about whether the animal can tell one human from another.
Those are separate abilities and they are tested in completely different ways. The crow work used rubber masks worn by different people. The gull work varied where a person was looking. Both of those designs isolate a human. The mirror test isolates the bird.
We went through the mask design in the crow article and the gaze design in the gull article. Neither has a magpie equivalent that we could find.
The Australian claim, and what it rests on
The other half of this question comes from Australia, where magpies and people share suburbs at close quarters and have opinions about each other.
- The claim
- That Australian magpies recognize and remember individual human faces for many years, remember who treated them well, and remember who did not
- The supporting context
- They are long lived and they stay put. Reported lifespans run to 25 to 30 years, and the Australian Museum describes groups of up to 24 birds holding a territory year round and defending it as a group
- What we could not find
- A number. Nothing we could open says how many people a magpie can tell apart, or how the memory was measured, or over what interval it was tested
- So how we are treating it
- As a well informed claim from people who work on this bird, not as a measured result we can put a figure on
That is a weaker statement than most pages will give you. It is the one the sources we could open actually support.
The swooping is not a grudge
Australian magpies are famous for diving at people in spring, and the two ideas get welded together into "it remembers you and it is coming for you."
The Australian Museum describes it plainly. Some individuals become aggressive toward any intruder that comes too close to the nest site, humans included, and the birds are not trying to hurt anyone. They are defending young.
Intruder is the operative word. That is a description of a place and a season, not of a person.
The magpie an American reader actually has
The Cornell Lab describes the Black-billed Magpie as a bird of western North America, in meadows, grasslands and sagebrush plains, nesting along stream courses and keeping to open country near cover rather than dense forest.
- Where
- Western North America. If you are east of the Great Plains, this is not your bird
- What it eats
- Wild fruit, grain, insects, small mammals, bird eggs and carrion. Cornell notes that they pick ticks off large animals and cache food when they find a lot of it
- Where it hangs around people
- Cornell puts them near barnyards, livestock areas and grain elevators
- Legal status
- Cornell notes they were historically persecuted as pests and are now fully protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act
That last line is worth keeping in mind before anyone acts on a magpie they find annoying.
What this means at a bird bath
This section is our judgment applied to the sources above, and we are marking it as such.
- Water is not the draw here. Nothing in the diet list above is water dependent in an unusual way. A magpie at a bird bath is a large corvid taking a drink, not a bird that came for the basin.
- Expect caching, and expect a mess. Cornell describes magpies storing surplus food. Anything cached near water eventually ends up in it. That changes the cleaning interval and not the method, which is in the guide to cleaning a concrete bird bath.
- Do not treat a western magpie like an Australian one. The swooping stories are about a different bird on a different continent in a different season. Carrying that fear across is the same mistake this whole article is about.
- Leave them alone. They are protected, they eat the insects you did not want, and Cornell records them removing ticks from large animals.
What we could not check
- What we read in full
- The 2008 mirror paper, the Australian Museum species page, a piece written for a general audience on Australian magpies and people, and the Cornell Lab account for the Black-billed Magpie
- What does not exist as far as we can tell
- A mask study, a gaze study or a matched observer study on any magpie. The designs that produced the crow, pigeon and gull results have not been run on this bird
- The claim we are declining to make
- That magpies recognize humans. One species may, on the word of people who study it, without a number attached. Another passed a mirror test that asks a different question. The third has not been tested
Frequently asked questions
Did magpies really pass the mirror test
Two of the five birds tested did, with both controls in place. That is the accurate version of the sentence you usually see.
Will an Australian magpie remember me next year
People who study them say yes. We could not find the experiment behind it, so we are passing on the claim with that label attached rather than a figure.
Do magpies hold grudges like crows
The corvid grudge results belong to crows and ravens and were produced by specific designs. They are in the crow article and the raven article. Nobody has run those designs on a magpie.
Are magpies smart
The mirror result is a serious piece of evidence that at least some of them do something no other bird had been shown to do. It is also five birds. Both of those are true.
Why do so many pages mix the two magpies up
Because they share a name and both stories are good. It is the same reason people carry crow numbers onto every black bird they see, which we ran into again writing about hummingbirds.
References
- Reference: Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of Self-Recognition | Prior, Schwarz and Guentuerkuen, PLOS Biology, 2008
- Reference: Australian Magpie | The Australian Museum species page, giving the family and the territory behavior
- Reference: Magpies can form friendships with people | The Conversation, on Australian magpies and individual people
- Reference: Black-billed Magpie Life History | The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds