The Magpie Spring: A Lockdown Story
How a family of corvids helped me cope with Covid.
In the courtyard behind our apartment building in Paris there is a cherry tree. Tall and spindly, its uppermost branches are level with our kitchen window on the third floor — so close you can almost reach out and touch them. Last spring, a few days after we’d been locked down (the French called it “confinement”, perhaps to rhyme with “refinement”) I noticed that a pair of magpies had started building a nest there.
Thanks to the proximity of the tree it was like watching a wildlife documentary. I’d stand at the window sipping my morning espresso, a sedate activity ideal for avian espionage, as my new neighbours bustled about their project. They hopped from branch to branch — or flapped to an adjacent tree — and used their sharp beaks to scythe off long whippy twigs. These they poked and weaved into what was beginning to look like a shaggy crown, held in a cradle of branches.
After lunch I’d be back, the espresso replaced with a glass of wine, to check on them. If they were aware of me they didn’t show it — they never spared me a beady glance. I felt like faking a breathy David Attenborough voiceover: “Magpies are among the most intelligent of all creatures…”
I looked them up, of course. I learned that they’re clever enough to recognise their own reflections. That they’re revered in East Asia as symbols of good fortune. That the magpie is the national bird of Korea. And that they don’t actually steal or collect shiny objects — a myth trafficked by Rossini, among others, in his 1817 opera The Thieving Magpie.
Actually I was happy that the nesting couple were magpies and not, say, crows. With their black and white plumage they looked spectacular and odd; there was a dash of sorcery about them. When I was a kid there was a TV show called Magpie — chirpy presenters showing us how to make toys out of cereal packets — and its theme song was the nursery rhyme about the birds: “One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy…” The last lines are “nine for hell, ten for the devil himself”. Which the show didn’t include, obviously.
Two for joy, then. With the news full of rising case numbers and deaths, I needed some of that.
I was locked down with my wife and son, but they didn’t share my fascination with the nest. I thought that at least my little boy, who was eight, might have been interested — but he found the birds too large and scary. It’s true that their harsh cry — scritch scritch! — made them sound a bit like velociraptors.
It’s also true that I have a history with birds. Until about the age of eleven I was quite the amateur ornithologist, fascinated by the bird table in our garden. I had binoculars and books (The Observer’s Book of Birds). I made sketches. But as adolescence approached the passion waned — I suppose I sensed that it was “uncool”. Today, in middle age, I can feel it emerging again, like a half-forgotten skill.
One of the habits I’d adopted very early into lockdown was to go for a morning run. I’ve always been a swimmer — but the pools were closed, so I got my exercise where I could. I’d be out of the door at six, then pound the streets around the closed park. Although it was still dark, I could hear the birds: a riot of them, making an almost tropical din. Spring was being celebrated, as always, but with limited human participation. It occurred to me that nature might be spring cleaning — and it was throwing us out.
During the ten years we’d lived in our apartment the cherry tree had always blossomed in spring: a frothy bouquet of pink. But this year — nothing. Its branches remained bare. When I asked the owner of the ground-floor apartment about it — while masked and keeping my distance, of course — she said she thought the tree’s roots might be damaged. Or perhaps it had simply died of old age. Neither of us mentioned the word “disease”.
The upside was that I still had an unobstructed view of the nest. By now it was finished and had assumed the shape of a diving bell — I had to imagine the small entrance at the top. The female magpie had made herself at home: I saw occasional flutters through the dense mesh of branches. The male bird zipped off on regular sorties, presumably for food, although I never saw a worm dangling cartoon-like from his beak.
When he perched on a branch particularly close to the window, I could admire his oily plumage, with glints of emerald and mauve and silver. It changed with the light. He’d preen himself, lifting a wing edged in turquoise.
In mid-April the nest went oddly quiet
One morning as I stood there a big crow came to investigate the nest, hobbling ever closer, neck extended, beak in jabbing mode. The male magpie was nowhere to be seen. Should I tamper with the course of nature? Of course I bloody should! I opened the window and banged it shut. The crow skedaddled like an umbrella tossed by the wind.
He came back a few times, but the male magpie fought him off in bouts of aerial combat, tumbling helter-skelter, darting and pecking and screeching — and after a certain point I never saw the crow again.
A painful irony of the Paris lockdown was that one of the finest springs in living memory was happening outside. The lack of traffic pollution meant that the skies were a Renaissance blue, free even of vapour trails. Blossom exploded everywhere. New leaves were shiny and succulent. “They’ll call this ‘The Lost Spring’,” I wrote in my diary. They don’t — but I still do.
Sometime in mid-April the nest went oddly quiet. The male’s absences felt longer. Every time I went to the kitchen I stared at the ragged structure. Was that a movement? A tremor? Yes — I thought it was. She was still in there. Finally, one morning, I was rewarded with a sound that made me open the window to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. A tuneless chorus of high-pitched complaints, like a brace of children whistling through their front teeth.
It had to be — baby magpies!
From then on I was even more attentive to the nest. I’d break off in the middle of writing articles to go and look at it. What if the crow came back? Surely the chicks were even more tempting than eggs? I could hardly bear the thought of anything happening to them. “Ever the doting father,” my wife teased me. And it’s true that my son can get away with anything around me. Just one more cookie? Oh, go on then. And I ruffle his blond head.
A morning came when I called out to him, because here was something he had to see. Two baby magpies, perched not far from the nest, as small and fluffy as plush toys. My face must have looked like that emoji with hearts for eyes. They were mignons — cute — agreed my little boy.
I had no idea what gender they were, so I decided they were a boy and a girl. Over the following weeks they grew bigger, venturing from branch to branch, edging further from the nest. They made daring expeditions to a neighbouring tree. But they always came back, never straying far from home.
Until they did. They flew off to live their magpie lives, way beyond my kitchen window. From time to time they returned, still small enough that I recognized them — but soon they were indistinguishable from their parents. Or from any other magpie that might drop by. The nest was a husk, the remnant of a forgotten civilization.
Lockdown ended on May 11, the day before my birthday. Over the summer the dead cherry tree grew grey and brittle, as if it was already ash. One night in late August there was an almighty storm, with horizontal rain and apocalyptic thunder, cracks of fluorescent lightning. My son and I watched it with thrilled horror from his bedroom window, as if it was a disaster movie. We should have had popcorn.
Somehow we missed the event, but in the morning the evidence was clear. The top of the cherry tree had broken off, no doubt due to the weight of the nest. The remaining section of trunk looked as raw as a snapped bone. I opened the window and peered down. There in the courtyard was a mess of branches and twigs, broken and scattered. It was hard to separate the nest from the rest of the wrecked tree.
The magpie nest was gone forever. But I didn’t care, because the young magpies were free. And so were we. For now.
