A couple of years ago, our garden was always overrun with up to twenty magpies at a time. They would sit on the garden wall all day, cawing and fighting and chasing the smaller birds, my dad even saw one pulling apart a little nest. We tried everything to get rid of them, scare tactics, water guns, cats, you name it. Nothing budged them, they just could not be scared away. It developed into psychological warfare between the magpies and my father, and eventually he bought a Larssen trap, procured a calling bird and began picking them off one by one. Controversial, I know. I don't think I'd be able to do it myself personally. (But he was told that capturing them and releasing them elsewhere was just as cruel, as magpies are very territorial and any unfamiliar ones appearing in another area would be chased and killed by the local birds.)

The funny thing is, even now, about four years after the 'season of death', no magpie will come into our garden, sit on the wall or even the fence across the way. It's as though we have passed into magpie folklore as forbidden ground.