May• 2019 | 17days when I heard a commotion,” he
told her. “I raced to the duck pen to
find he had a fox bailed up, cornered
in the pen against the wire netting,
wings flapping and bill snapping.”
The farmer dispatched the fox
with a shotgun and Mrs Duck
was an instant hero.
Mrs Duck’s fearlessness
in the face of carnivorous
canines had set him apart. From
then on we called him Mrs Duck,
Fox Hunter.Willy Wagtail’s
Good Deed
ANNE MARR
Early one October morning in 1997,
a young magpie, still at an age when
his parents would be feeding him,
was dropped off to my home for care.
He’d flown into the windscreen of a
car but luckily a nice young woman,
who had previously brought me an
injured owl, was driving by on her way
to work. She stopped to check on him
and, thankfully, he was still breathing.
I wrote down the details of where
he’d been found so I could hopefully
release him when he recovered.
Two days later the young magpie
was doing well, eating, but not at
all happy to find himself in a cage.
Nothing was broken and his wing
feathers were fine so I decided to
return him to where he’d been found.
At 5.30am, I pulled off the road and
got out the rescue cage containing my
very grumpy young magpie. Openingthe door, I offered my arm and he
jumped onto it, looked around and
I could see he knew where he was.
Next to us was a telegraph pole, of
which he flew straight to the top to
join a willie wagtail. The wagtail made
lots of chattering noises and flew
off across the paddock. The young
magpie remained on the pole. I began
to worry and hoped he’d know where
to go as he still needed his parents.
The next minute I heard the
chattering of the willie wagtail.
He was flying back across the
paddock with two large magpies
following. They landed on either
side of the young magpie, all three
touched beaks, and then all three
put their heads in the air and
sang. The wagtail chattered away
excitedly, delighted he’d cleverly
ILLUSTRATIONS: GETTY IMAGES reunited the magpie family.