ONE FOR SORROW..

Quentin Letts

Last updated at 00:00 07 April 2003

LAST week a Glasgow housewife was branded a 'murderer' after revealing that she has caught and killed 100 magpies in her garden. Happy hunting, says QUENTIN LETTS, who warns that Britain is in the grip of a plague which threatens to wipe out the nation's songbirds.

OBLIVION comes quick and painlessly on magpie death row. The executioner's fingers are nimble and the victims barely know what is happening when their black and white bodies are swung through the air and their necks are struck snap! against the garden wall.

We are in Bearsden, a suburb that seems a blameless enough enclave of well-to-do tolerance. But it is not a good place to be if you are one of Britain's 650,000 magpies.

Correction. One of Britain's 649,900 magpies. Local resident Lesley Mackiggan has dispatched 100 of the noisy so-and-sos and she and her neighbours are after plenty more.

Mrs Mackiggan sent the animal rights lobby into a tailspin by going on Radio 4's Today programme to describe her campaign of attrition 'Three years ago I happened to look out of the window and see 55 magpies in a tree,' she said.

'They are pretty evil, these magpies. They tend to go for baby birds and anything else they can attack.

'So I decided to get a trap and I've been catching them with fair regularity.

'If they'd all been breeding, there would probably be 800 sitting at the bottom of the garden by now.' Within minutes the protests erupted. The airwaves were thick with squawks about 'medieval superstition' and brutality.

Hundreds of listeners called the BBC to express opposition to what the soft- spoken, 61-year-old mother-of-three was doing. Others were just as vehemently in their support.

The chatter of dissent was not dissimilar to the din these days from many a country copse and town garden that has been colonised by the rampaging, murderous magpie. For Britain is in the grip of something approaching a magpie plague.

In 1960 there were 100,000 across our isles. Now they are the most visible bird in the country, squiring it round the place to the exclusion of tits, finches and yellowhammers.

Magpies destroy some 20million songbird eggs a year.

That is why Mrs Mackiggan and thousands elsewhere are trapping, shooting and using other measures of last resort.

'One for sorrow, two for joy,' the rhyme used to start. These days it is more likely to be one or two score, if not more, for a headache and an otherwise denuded hedgerow.

'They are taking over,' says Mrs Mackiggan. 'It's scary.' The Hampshire-based Game Conservancy Trust is inclined to agree. Its own research suggests that magpies are a significant factor in the recent steep decline in the number of British songbirds.

The trust sells hundreds of Pounds 66 Larsen traps, which lure magpies into a spring-doored cage using an already trapped bird as live 'bait'.

When two birds are in the trap it's time to remove one, kill it, and use the survivor to summon another.

This cull is legal. Magpies were classified as a pest in the 1981 Wildlife Act.

'You cannot just kill them for aesthetic reasons,' says the Game Conservancy's Morag Walker. 'It's not good enough just to hate them. But killing them to protect other wildlife is permitted.' SO has the Bearsden magpie massacre changed anything?

' The songbirds and blackbirds have returned and they are nesting, ' says a delighted Mrs Mackiggan.

'We've even got a woodpecker.' It is an experience shared by an expanding circle of magpie hunters in Glasgow.

'None of us knew each other beforehand, but magpies have brought us together and there are now about 12 of us,' says Mrs Mackiggan.

'When we go off on holiday we look after one another's decoy birds and traps.' More couples are joining by the month though it is usually the wives who do the actual killing. 'My husband couldn' t do i t , ' says Mrs Mackiggan. 'The female of the species is a bit deadlier.' Magpies view smaller birds not as tuneful colleagues on the branch, but as lunch.

They devour the eggs and, if they have already hatched, attack the chicks, pecking out their eyes and their hearts.

Young rabbits, fox cubs and field voles are also likely to be attacked.

Some farmers even claim that magpies can kill lambs, pulling at the remains of the umbilical cord with their sharp-bladed bills.

Evidence of its aggression is strong. But is the magpie the only culprit or are there other factors responsible for the songbirds' collapse?

Pica pica, to give the blackbilled North American magpie its Latin name, is a member of the corvid family related to the crow, jay and raven.

Although the raven has a certain glamour from its association with the Tower of London, corvids in general have an image problem.

Yet the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is watching the activities of Mrs Mackiggan and co with dismay.

Spokesman Grahame Madge insists shortage of food and changing agricultural practices are the real reasons why thrush are declining.

Commenting on the antimagpie 'crusaders', he said: 'They may not be breaking the law and we would not necessarily seek to challenge that, but they are breaking the spirit of the law.' The RSPB points out that magpies were common until the mid-19th century, having always been popular with farmers for preying on insects and rodents that ate crops.

In the mid 1800s, however, gamekeepers started to control magpie numbers for field sport reasons. It was only when gamekeepers themselves became something of an endangered species in the 1970s that the magpie revived.

There may also be something more visceral in this war magpies have long had an almost devilish reputation.

In nursery stories they are represented as thieves and all-round bad eggs, while in Sweden they associate the magpie with witchcraft.

IN Australia, magpies are notorious for swooping on humans. Three years ago Canberra police were called to 250 Hitchcockesque incidents in which the birds showed particular violence towards cyclists, red-haired women and babies in pushchairs.

In the Netherlands they drop pebbles on cars. A sign in The Hague says: 'Watch Out!

Stone- throwing magpies.

Park at your own risk.' Back in Bearsden, Lesley Mackiggan sits and waits.

At this time of year she can have two new captives a week.

Inside her Larsen trap the decoy, or 'calling bird', jumps and struts and caws. Before long another magpie will land on the trap, falling through the sprung hatch.

Mrs Mackiggan ensures that the birds kept in the cage are well fed and watered. She feels they deserve a good last feed.

' Yes,' she says sweetly, ' I suppose I am the "magpie murderer". But listen to that.' A twitter and a tweet from the trees. 'You see? I also look on myself as the "songbird saviour". And that's not a bad thing to be.'