Magpie

We've been worried about Maggie's widow Vicky, and whether she is going to find a new mate, so Saturday morning when she came to say hello, I had a long chat with her. The way this works is, you just talk, expressing all the things on your mind. She can't understand human words, of course, but if you talk long enough, she will follow your body language and get the drift.

So I talked: "We can't understand what is happening Vicky? Are you looking for a new mate? You have to show us, because we humans are really very stupid."

Georgie Magpie has not returned. The day we last saw her, we were getting some help from a friend doing home renovations, so we couldn't pay as much attention as usual, and our magpies would have been wary of the presence of other humans, so it may be they were trying to tell us where Georgie was going but we weren't listening.

The last three days we haven't seen Georgie, Vicky and Maggie's youngest and, for Maggie, his last child. Georgie would be about eight (months) now, and she has been missing once or twice before, so even though we are worried, this is normal behaviour for a magpie youngster.