Magpies have outwitted scientists by helping each other remove tracking devices | Hacker News Reader

Magpies have outwitted scientists by helping each other remove tracking devices

abc.net.au

183 pointsclouddrover55 comments

For non-Aussies: This is talking about the Australian Magpie, which is distinct from other international birds.

They have some beautiful calls/songs, and are notorious for being extremely territorial and will swoop/attack any intruders during mating season. They also recognise individual humans - which can be good or bad depending on your relationship with them.

Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n-d_u_jSJY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqSbDcks_uA

Australian magpies truly are amazing birds. I recall once seeing two young magpies lying on their side and play-wrestling. [Image: https://imgur.com/CxRsLE3] When one got tired, the other kept following it around — it obviously wanted to keep on playing. And when I have lunch outside, I regularly have magpies trying to creep up on me to steal my food, though they haven’t yet figured out that it doesn’t work when I’m looking straight them. (Which takes some courage; having a magpie look down its beak at you is a fairly unnerving experience.) I am not surprised at all to hear that they can work together to remove a mere backpack.

> they haven’t yet figured out that it doesn’t work when I’m looking straight them.

They don’t have forward facing eyes, so they might not understand that a human has to turn its head to see something.

> … they might not understand that a human has to turn its head to see something.

I’m pretty sure they understand this well — it’s common knowledge that a swooping magpie will stop attacking if you stare straight at it. (Of course, ‘common knowledge’ isn’t necessarily correct, but a quick search seems to confirm this case.)

> and will swoop/attack any intruders during mating season

This makes it sound like they're unreasonable or aggressive, which is very much not the case. They're just defending their nests from perceived threats.

>They also recognise individual humans - which can be good or bad depending on your relationship with them

This also means that if you're a regular in the area, you will have a reputation with them and (assuming you don't go out of your way to harass them and ruin said reputation) they will not bother to swoop. When I was a boy I spent a lot of time playing in a park near my house which had a number of magpie families, and was not swooped or threatened once.

> This makes it sound like they're unreasonable or aggressive, which is very much not the case.

That's a judgement/point of view call.

Having been swooped and attacked just for trying to walk down my driveway it's definitely easy to call it unreasonable and aggressive.

> you will have a reputation with them and (assuming you don't go out of your way to harass them and ruin said reputation) they will not bother to swoop

Maybe true in some rare cases, but I've not heard of that happening frequently without some kind of active relationship (such as through feeding). The magpies I lived near as a kid never got used to humans, and never let me pass without swooping.

As a kiwi, I find their calls to be ugly sounding, but it's highly likely I'm biased against imported species :) I trap and kill all the imported mamallian pests I cone across (mice, rats, possums), but have left the magpies alone for now, although they do complete with native species and are too big to be hunted by local hawks/falcons/etc

The scientists should themselves try wearing a 1-pound weight (proportional to this tracker compared to the magpie's weight) strapped to them 24-7 and unable to take it off before they make any further designs.

I do understand that this is about trying to help the magpies, but it still seems a bit hard-headed, like many other efforts to "help" those whom we're also harming with our activity.

The device weighs 0.0022 pounds.

Humans carry orders of magnitude more weight in fat on their body. I doubt people Would notice 400 grams after 10 minutes.

Would you notice it if you could never remove it, around the clock, even when sleeping, bathing, having sex, etc.

I have permanent nerve damage in 2 fingers on my left hand which gives permanent pins and needles.

You get used to it.

Just to ensure I'm understanding your analogy correctly, are you saying that because you have gotten used to the nerve damage in your fingers, it is OK to arbitrarily and non-consensually inflict nerve damage on other people, if it is for a good cause?

> it is OK to arbitrarily and non-consensually inflict nerve damage on other people

If that's what you got out of this then I feel sorry for you.

If you want to get consent from birds and other animals so that we can study their behavior and habbits so we can prevent issues caused by urbanization, deforsting, solar/wind power, etc. By all means go and get consent.

In the mean time people will continue to do real work with a minor inconvience to a few animals for the greater good.

Putting it that way makes it sound pretty trivial. I don't see a single pound of extra weight being something onerous and I consider myself to be more sentient than these animals.

Don't forget, you can never remove it. And you have to fly with it, bathe with it, have sex with it, never being able to remove it, with it continuously wrapped around you and rubbing against your body, even when you're tired, even when you're wet.

that would not encumber a human at all nor make a human pick a different outcome - there's a dozen places you could nicely nestle a pound and never realize it.

You clothes weigh more than that, your shoes WAY more than that, and we walk around all day with it... this is a weird point.

Remember: You can never take it off, 24 hours a day, even sleeping and in the shower. And it is not necessarily attached where you would choose to attach it.

I am aware of my shoes and clothes all the time. If someone forced me to wear something unfamiliar, ill fitting, and likely unbalancing, I would be seriously pissed off.

It doesn't seem weird to object to it to me at all.

We do this to people all the time. Right now there are hundreds of thousands of people in America who have been charged with a crime, but not yet been tried, and are released to go about their lives with GPS trackers attached to their legs while they await their day in court.

It became even more common in the COVID era because the jails had to be thinned out to reduce infection rates.

Thank you for supporting my argument.

Next presser: "We've changed our research and are now studying how Magpies defeat tracking devices. No further questions."

"This research may in the future lead to new ways humans can help each other remove surreptitiously placed Apple AirTags."

Magpies, like all crow-like birds (or at least that's how they are historically lumped together under Rabenvögel in German along with crows, ravens, and jackdaws, probably because they're scavengers) are fascinating, intelligent creatures. I've heard European magpies bring gifts when they take away food, like small decorative ensembles of sticks, stones, shells, and pieces of metal they picked up.

> at least that's how they are historically lumped together under Rabenvögel in German along with crows, ravens, and jackdaws, probably because they're scavengers

Corvidae or Corvids in English (from the Latin word for "raven" I believe): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae

> Corvidae or Corvids in English (from the Latin word for "raven" I believe): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae

The other way around: Raven is an English word, a species; Corvidae the Latin one of the family of species which includes the species raven (words ending on 'ae' is multiple in Latin, and typically denotes a Latin etymology (Latin origin)).

The parent is correct, "corvus" is Latin for raven. The scientific name for the family of species is also derived from "corvus", but it means "raven" nevertheless. In other words, the science community named the family after the latin word for raven, not the other way around.

This article is about Australian magpies, which aren't related to European Magpies and other corvids. They're known more for their extreme territoriality than for their intelligence, but OP's article clearly shows they're no dummies either.

This is a great story. Frustrating for the scientists. Amusing for the rest of us.

Anyone else get bothered seeing wild animals tagged like that? I recall watching a documentary where they were tagging rhinos and elephants for “conservation” purposes, but oops some of them suffocated during tranquilization. Even if everything goes perfectly, it still feels like a massive invasion of privacy, and it’s pretty clear the animals really do not like it given how hard they’ll try to remove them.

I’ll eat my fair share of farmed meat so maybe I should just keep my mouth shut, yet I remain bothered seeing wild animals forced into a constantly monitored and physically uncomfortable situation.

Perhaps my concerns could be alleviated by papers showing direct positive outcomes for the species under observation?

I would be astonished if they had a concept of privacy that could be violated by a tracking device, and even more astonished if they could somehow deduce that the device is actually sending invisible rays that contain information about their whereabouts to humans. Moreover, I've seen no evidence that tracking devices in general cause discomfort or stress, or that animals tend to try hard to remove them, before these magpies. Indeed that would defeat the whole purpose of a tracking device by changing the animal's behavior, which is why they're obviously designed so as to minimize any such change in behavior.

Are you equivalently comfortable tracking humans who do not ponder privacy and/or realize they are being tracked? Honest question, I know some developers will give an unequivocal “yes” to the above.

As for the discomfort, I don’t have a link but it was a Love Nature episode focused on rhinos. They stated they needed to invest in heavy duty materials affixed to the horn by drilling through it otherwise the rhinos would remove the device. In the same episode a rhino died of suffocation after the tranquilizer knocked them unconscious in an undesirable position, and the verdict was that such occurrences were unavoidable costs of doing business.

> Are you equivalently comfortable tracking humans who do not ponder privacy and/or realize they are being tracked?

Not OP, but:

Even speaking as a strict vegan, there's a pretty big difference between a human having not thought about privacy much, and an animal that literally has different conceptual experiences of the world. I really don't see the equivalence.

It's like getting upset about a cat walking into the bathroom while their owner is pooping; these are creatures with completely different mental models of the world and to me part of respecting animals is not trying to force all of their mental models through a human framework. Again speaking as a vegan, that doesn't mean we can just ignore their experiences of the world or that we should be fine with causing them physical or mental pain, but I really don't believe there is any conceptual mapping between modern human privacy notions and animal privacy.

If people want to argue the devices are causing discomfort or that it's risky to trap/tag the birds without injuring them, then fine, those are different arguments. If they want to argue that magpies in specific do have some kind of mental model of privacy or norm that we're violating, then they can make that argument as well (although I suspect there isn't any real evidence for that). But no, I don't believe that it's violating their privacy to watch them, and I don't think that a human who is being secretly tracked or who hasn't thought much about privacy is the equivalent to a magpie's internal model of the world.

At the very least, if we're going to talk about mental torture for an animal, that conversation should be framed around what we know about the animal's point-of-view, not based around what a human would feel. A lot of mental harm has been caused by us assuming that animals just work the same way that humans do, and in using that assumption to decide that certain actions towards them are good or bad based purely on what we would feel in their position.

Interesting. I'll admit this isn't my area, and as a hymenopterologist I'm really only an interested amateur in any case; I will say that I've never observed any wasp to be obviously dismayed by my camera flashes, and only once even by my presence - a bald-faced yellowjacket who was surprised to find me inches away upon emerging from a flower where she'd been nectaring, and circled my head a few times before zipping off about her occasions.

But then, on the other hand, I'm not really interfering with them, and certainly not attaching a semi-permanent tracker - the most you ever see in that direction with wasps is a dab of paint on the dorsal thorax, as with queen bee marking, which if perhaps not perfectly innocuous is still certainly much less intrusive than the devices typically applied to mammals and in this case at least to birds.

Can you cite the claim that the subjects of tracking studies typically find the trackers innocuous?

> hymenopterologist

Had to look that one up. Wasn’t sure if it was a joke from high school or a real field. The latter, for those interested - bees, wasps, and such.

It's a specialization of entomology, yes. That said, and to the point of your initial uncertainty, there has long been question over the presence of the "hymen-" radical in the family name Hymenoptera ("-ptera" meaning "winged", cf. Orthoptera "straight-winged", Hemiptera "half-winged", Lepidoptera "jewel-winged", etc., and also eg Chiroptera "hand-winged" for bats.) It's confidently understood to derive from the name of a Greek god of marriage, as does the name of a more widely known mammalian membrane, but no one is entirely certain why that radical was used here.

It was previously thought that "hymeno-" referred to the membranous nature of the hymenopteran wing, but this doesn't make much sense given that all insect wings are membranous to some extent; a name in that sense would not differentiate the family, and thus be a relatively unlikely choice even on the part of a classical taxonomist. Currently the radical is understood instead to refer to the fashion in which hymenopterans' rear wings can lock into the forewings via a series of small hooks, in order to both support the mechanics of flight and allow bees and wasps to narrowly fold their wings along their backs where they do not obstruct entry into narrow spaces such as brood burrows and nest cells. This feature, which is distinctive to hymenopterans, could very reasonably have inspired the family name Hymenoptera, meaning "married-winged".

correction: Lepidoptera is correctly "scale-winged". What I get for relying on memory rather than checking the etymology for the name of a family I rarely study...

Interesting. My roots are weak, but I saw "opt" and thought of "opto" not breaking it into ptera. Thanks for the information.

Somewhat embarrassingly, I was wrong about wasps and radio tracking! Some sparrow wasps (V. mandarinia) were tagged with transmitters as a means of locating a nest in Washington state about a year and a half ago, the first nest known to exist in the US. (1)

Granted, with the objective of locating the nest being in this case its extirpation, that the tracker should be innocuous would be of secondary concern in this case. However, rendering the tracked wasps unable to fly would somewhat defeat the purpose, so one assumes it was designed not to interfere too much with their activities - a difficulty no doubt ameliorated by these wasps' unmatched size and strength.

I'd like to read the paper undoubtedly since published by the entomologists involved, but haven't the time just now to find it. But speaking of finding things - given how late in the year that nest was located, it's very probable that any mated gynes to whom it had given rise had dispersed from the nest and possibly entered diapause before the nest was found. Between that and the sparrow wasp's relatively reclusive nesting habit, while this was the first nest known to exist in the US, it's almost certain not to be the last.

(1) https://www.geekwire.com/2020/using-radio-trackers-scientist...

I agree they likely have no knowledge or concept of privacy, but just wanted to point out:

> astonished if they could somehow deduce that the device is actually sending invisible rays that contain information about their whereabouts

The fact that the victim is unaware does not excuse the crime!

If a human walked out on the street after forgetting his pants, is it a crime if I look at him?

Show me an animal that prefers to wear clothes and I'll start considering it's privacy.

Look all you want, but maybe draw the line somewhere before “shoot them with a tranquilizer dart and glue a gps transmitter to them while they’re passed out”

Given that birds exhibit magnetoreception, it's not outside the realms of probability that they could sense EM radiation

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroreception

Elephants and Rhinos are endangered due to poaching and habitat destruction, some on an extremely critical level. I'm sure conservationists would rather not tag them, but given the alternative might be extinction, what else is there to do?

One example of tethered animals that have a choice are falcons and other raptors that are tied to a perch during the day when they are not being flown. These birds usually return to their handlers at the end of a display (admittedly food is involved) and submit to be being re-perched. Either they have appallingly bad memories or don't mind the perch, which is understandable given that many of them are sprint predators who when fed would naturally perch in a tree for hours.

For birds when they are trapped and banded they are not tranquilized, typically they can be placed in a sock or otherwise wrapped up to restrain them and keep them calm, so the chances of them dying or getting hurt are very low. I’ve been involved in several bird banding outings and never saw a bird get hurt or die. The privacy thing is another issue I’ll leave to other experts.

In the US, a lot of wildlife conservation work involves trapping and tagging wild animals. I listen to a popular hunting podcast where wildlife biologists are often brought on as guests, and a LOT of the information they get seems to be directly from GPS collars. Science is the primary and proper tool for wildlife management policy under the North American Model of conservation, and GPS collars are the primary way of tracking things like mortality, migration, etc. that inform such science.

The main thing to remember is that, practically speaking, conservation is about a population, not the individuals within the population. The point isn't to save the individual deer, rather the point is to make sure that 100 years from now, deer are still around. This is how things like the the Pittman-Robertson Act are justified -- funding wildlife conservation from tag/license sales to hunters to kill wildlife. The results (the foundation of arguably the most successful wildlife restoration programs in human history, responsible for bringing dozens of major species back from near-extinction) speak for themselves.

Mag pi-hole?

Magpies have learned to remove tracking devices, but we haven’t. Makes you wonder which is the smarter species?

Amazing!

Maybe a better approach is to follow them from a distance with small autonomous drones.

I'm pretty sure 3 or 4 magpies working together can take down a small drone.

A Melbourne-based pilot vlogger/content creator had his drone attacked by some Magpies in 2020[1].

So, at least those, didn't like having a Drone around. No doubt they could take one down, but I suspect it'd result in some injury to the birds, too (from making contact with the props)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY71Fywr8Pk

One raven giving it a go:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-11/wing-resumes-drone-de...

One wedge-tailed eagle being more effective:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-05-24/wedge-tailed-ea...

In breeding season, magpies are notoriously territorial. To the point where cyclists all over Australia have zip ties tied to their helmets to act as spike-like deterrants to swooping magpies.

They would absolutely ruin a drone in about 3 seconds flat with no worries.

I liked the tip in your link advising people to

> Attach fake eyes, or an image of eyes, to the back of a hat or helmet. Magpies will mostly attack from behind, so if they think you are watching them out of the back of your head, they will be less likely to swoop or attack. If you do not have a hat or helmet, try wearing your sunglasses back-to-front.

That may not work out so well,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU8sJ8aeyC4&t=0s

This is an Australian wedge tailed eagle all out against a drone.

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