Pica pica Magpie Feather Crows Birds Aves Passeriformes Corvidae

Feathers Bird Eurasian or Common Magpie Pica pica cm 13.5-15.5 Crows Birds Aves Passeriformes Corvidae.
Family: Corvidae (crows).
Common name: Eurasian Magpie or Common Magpie.
Syn. Pica hudsonia.

The Magpie, also known as the Eurasian Magpie (Pica pica, Linnaeus, 1758), is a passerine bird of the corvid family.
These are slender-looking birds with a long, strong conical black beak with a hooked end. The plumage is black and pure white. There is no sexual dimorphism in the coloration, which, instead, tends to have a certain variability at a population level. It measures 46–50 cm in length, of which half is the tail.
The magpie is a bird with diurnal habits, moving from trees to the ground
The magpie is very curious and intelligent: similarly to other corvids, its ratio between brain size and total size is very close to that of cetaceans and anthropomorphic apes, a characteristic it shares with jackdaws and which places it among the most absolutely intelligent.
Magpies, in fact, show complex social rituals, which highlight the presence of social cognition, imagination, episodic memory, self-awareness (the magpie is one of the very few animals to have successfully passed the mirror test) and even mourning. These birds are also able to imitate the sounds of their surroundings, including the human voice.
The diet is omnivorous and very opportunistic, consisting roughly of everything edible that the animal can find in its territory.
The magpie is a frequent visitor to anthropized areas for finding food: it usually stops or nests in trees at the edge of fast roads to feed on animals that have run over it, just as it is not uncommon (although it is limited in this by the competition of larger and more aggressive crows as well as seagulls) observe it while it rummages in the rubbish bins or opens the bags with its beak to extract food scraps.
The magpie has a Palearctic distribution. These are sedentary birds, which rarely move more than 30 km from their place of birth.