When Dominique Potvin and her team set out to test a new technology for tracking birds, they didn’t think they were entering into an interspecies game of one-upmanship. Instead, Potvin, an animal ...

Human noise pollution is taking its toll on the iconic Australian magpie, affecting the songbirds' ability to forage for food, communicate and respond to alarm calls—but smart birds are less affected ...

Magpies are highly social and live in groups of two or 12 individuals that defend, occupy, and breed cooperatively. Toby Hudson via Wikicommons under CC BY-SA 3.0 When researchers placed small GPS ...

When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn't expect to discover an entirely new social behavior rarely seen in birds. Our goal was to ...

Australian magpies have made themselves at home in human cities, but that doesn’t mean that urban environments are free of challenges. New research suggests that human noise pollution affects the ...

Have you ever been dive-bombed by a magpie? I have. I didn’t grow up with these aggressive, bauble loving birds of the American West, so I didn’t realize their propensity for coming after shiny things ...