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Thanks to Emma for this week's suggestion about the magpie! We'll learn all about the magpie and also about the mirror test for intelligence and self-awareness.\n\nThe black-billed magpie of North America (left) is almost identical in appearance to the Eurasian magpie (right):\n\n \n\nNot all magpies are black and white. This green magpie is embarrassed by its goth cousins:\n\n\n\nThe beautiful and altruistic azure-winged magpie:\n\n\n\nChimps pass the mirror test. So do magpies:\n\n\n\nThe Australian magpie, or as Emma calls it, MURDERBIRD:\n\n \n\nShow transcript:\n\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\n\nThis week let\u2019s learn about the magpie, a frighteningly intelligent bird. Thanks to Emma for the suggestion!\n\nThe magpie is a member of the corvid family, so it\u2019s related to crows, ravens, jackdaws, jays, rooks, and a few other kinds of birds. Most magpies are native to Europe and Asia, but there are a couple of species found in western North America. There are also two species found in Australia, but we\u2019ll come back to those later on. People think of magpies as black and white, but some Asian species are green or blue. They look like parrots at first glance.\n\nThe most well-known magpie is the Eurasian or common magpie. Its body and shoulders are bright white and its head, tail, wings, beak, and legs are a glossy black. It has a very long tail for its size, a little longer than its body, and its wingspan is about two feet across, or 62 cm. It looks so much like the black-billed magpie of western North America that for a long time people thought the two birds were the same species.\n\nLike most corvid species, the magpie is omnivorous. It will eat plant material like acorns and seeds, insects and other invertebrates, the eggs and babies of other birds, and roadkill and other carrion. It will also hunt small animals in groups. It mates for life and is intensely social.\n\nThe big thing about the magpie is how intelligent it is. It\u2019s a social bird with a complex society, tool use, excellent memory, and evidence of emotions usually only attributed to mammals, like grief. An experiment with a group of Azure-winged magpies, a species that lives in Asia, shows something called prosocial behavior, which is incredibly rare except in humans and some other primates. Prosocial behavior is also called altruism. In the experiment, a magpie could operate a seesaw to deliver food to other members of its flock, but it wouldn\u2019t get any food itself. All the magpies tested in this way made sure their bird buddies got the food. When access to the food was blocked for the other birds, the bird operating the seesaw didn\u2019t operate it.\n\nThe magpie also passes what\u2019s called the mirror test. The mirror test is when a researcher temporary places a colored dot on an animal\u2019s body in a place where it can\u2019t see it, usually the face. Then a mirror is introduced into the animal\u2019s enclosure. If an animal sees the dot in the reflection and investigates its own body to try to examine or remove the dot, the researcher concludes that the animal understands that the reflection is itself, not another animal.\n\nThis sounds simple because most humans pass the mirror test when we\u2019re still just toddlers. But most animals don\u2019t. Obviously researchers haven\u2019t been able to try the test with every single animal in the world, but even so, the results they\u2019ve found have been surprising. Great apes pass the test, bottlenose dolphins and orcas have passed, and the European magpie has passed the test. Cleaner wrasse fish also passed the test.\n\nYou know what else passed the mirror test? Ants.\n\nThe mirror test is supposed to be a test of self-awareness, but that\u2019s not necessarily what it\u2019s showing. Dogs fail the mirror test but pass other tests that more clearly indicate self-awareness. But in dogs, the sense of smell is much more important than sight. Humans don\u2019t even usually think of smell since we\u2019re more attuned to sight and hearing,...