Do Magpies Steal Shiny Things? The Myth Put to the Test

The University of Exeter experiment

The best-known test of the myth was carried out by psychologists at the University of Exeter in England and published in the journal Animal Cognition (online in 2014, in print in 2015). The team wanted to know whether the “thieving magpie” had any basis in fact.

They placed piles of food on the ground with small objects nearby. Some objects were shiny: metal screws, small rings of aluminum foil and pieces of foil. The others were identical objects covered with matte blue paint. If magpies were attracted to shine, they should have taken the shiny items more often.

They did not. In 64 trials with wild magpies, the birds picked up a shiny object only twice, and both times they dropped it again straight away. The magpies ignored the dull objects as well. Instead, they were cautious around all the unfamiliar items: they often approached the food warily and ate less of it when strange objects of either kind were nearby. The study concluded that the shine itself made no difference to the birds.

Why magpies are wary of new things

Avoiding unfamiliar objects is called neophobia, literally “fear of the new”. For a wild bird it makes good sense. A strange object on the ground could be a trap, a hiding predator or something dangerous to eat, and a bird that rushes to grab anything unusual is taking a risk.

Many members of the crow family are neophobic, even though they are also curious and good at learning. A magpie will often watch a new object for some time, approach it slowly, and only investigate when it seems safe. That is very different from the image of a bird that swoops down on glittering rings.

Where did the thieving magpie myth come from?

The belief that magpies steal shiny objects is found in British, French and Italian folklore, and in many countries of Central and Eastern Europe the magpie is a traditional symbol of a thief or a gossip. Two famous stories spread the idea worldwide:

• Rossini’s opera La gazza ladra (“The Thieving Magpie”, 1817). A servant girl is accused of stealing silver, and the real culprit turns out to be a magpie. Its overture is one of the best-known pieces of classical music.
• Hergé’s Tintin story The Castafiore Emerald (1963). The missing jewel has been taken by a magpie.

Magpies are bold, noisy birds that live close to people, steal food from bird tables and sometimes raid other birds’ nests. That real behavior, together with their striking black-and-white looks, probably made them an easy choice for the role of the cheeky thief in stories. Once the image was established, it was repeated so often that many people took it as fact.

What do magpies really collect?

Magpies do collect things, but mostly food. Like other corvids, the Eurasian magpie hides surplus food such as nuts, seeds, meat scraps and insects in small caches in the ground, in grass tussocks or in crevices, then returns to eat it later. Magpies remember many cache sites and may move a cache if they notice another bird watching.

They also gather building materials. A magpie nest is a large dome of sticks with a mud cup lined with fine roots, hair and grass. Birds nesting in towns sometimes use human materials: in 2023, researchers described magpie nests in Belgium and the Netherlands made partly of metal anti-bird spikes taken from buildings. These spikes were used for their shape as nest defenses, not for their shine.

Curious young magpies do explore new things with their bills, and tame or captive birds may play with small objects. A magpie may occasionally carry off a bottle top or a piece of foil, but there is no evidence that it seeks out shiny items in preference to dull ones.

Do other birds collect shiny things?

The myth is often told about jackdaws, crows and ravens too, and stories of pet jackdaws hoarding coins and buttons are old and widespread. Tame corvids certainly play with objects, which fits their curious, intelligent nature, described in how smart are crows and ravens?

The birds that really do decorate with bright objects are the bowerbirds of Australia and New Guinea. Male bowerbirds build elaborate structures and arrange colored items, such as blue flowers, berries, shells and pieces of plastic, to attract females. Some bowerbird species prefer particular colors, which shows that a bird can be attracted to bright objects. Magpies simply do not seem to be among them.

Myth versus evidence

The Exeter study was small and focused on one part of the magpie’s range, so scientists would not say it is the final word. But together with what is known about magpie behavior, the evidence points clearly in one direction:

For another magpie superstition, see why do people salute magpies?