The magpies on your street are not passing through. They are a family, and they have almost certainly lived there longer than most of the neighbours. A group can number up to twenty four birds, all of them holding and caring for one shared patch of ground, and a bonded pair may keep the same address for twenty years. Magpies can live to twenty five, sometimes thirty. That great carolling that rolls across the garden at dawn is the family talking about home: one bird begins it, another answers, and often the whole group joins until the song becomes a chorus that says, warmly and unmistakably, we are still here. Watch one out on the grass and you will see the loveliest thing they do. It stops. It tilts its head to one side and holds perfectly still, because its hearing is sharp enough to find a grub moving under the soil, and then it walks three steps and takes it.
The young ones have to learn all of it. A juvenile stays inside the family territory for a year or more, trailing the adults across the lawn, begging, watching, gradually working out where food hides and what the different calls mean. Professor Gisela Kaplan at the University of New England, who has spent a career studying them, found that young magpies take months before they can tell a neighbour's voice from a stranger's, and at first they manage it only by looking to the adults for the answer. It is a proper apprenticeship, and the whole family teaches. Magpies also recognise individual human faces, at least a hundred of them, and remember for years, which means the family on your street has long since worked out who you are. That makes the best way to be with them the simplest one: say a quiet hello when you pass, leave them plenty of room, and then just watch. There is a great deal to see.
Our short take: drawing on the work of Professor Gisela Kaplan at the University of New England, whose book Australian Magpie: Biology and Behaviour of an Unusual Songbird is published by CSIRO Publishing, with additional detail from the Australian Museum. Photograph: an adult magpie feeding a juvenile in Victoria Park, Sydney, by Toby Hudson via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.