In a scene from ‘Killer Magpie’, brave civil servants from CSIRO put their bodies on the line to show things sticking out of your helmet may not be such a great magpie deterrant.
On Saturday I copped my first magpie attack for 2011 on a lonely stretch near Woodend in Victoria.
This was my third maggie attack and very gentle compared to attack 2, which happened when I got lost along a creek/drain in Bundoora a couple of years ago. In their nice, quiet breeding-ground that I had stumbled into the magpies all opted to attack my ears, rather than helmet. And being lost, I had to run their snappy gauntlet twice.
According to Darryl Jones’s 2002 book Magpie Alert: Learning to Live with a Wild Neighbour – which can be viewed in part at Google Books – (as quoted in Wikipedia), only a small percentage of magpies become highly aggressive during breeding season (late August to early October) and swoop and sometimes attack passersby. While difficult to estimate, the percentage, according to Darryl, is significantly less than 9 per cent.
Almost all attacking birds (99 per cent) are male and attacks begin as eggs hatch, increase in frequency and severity as the chicks grow, and tail off as the chicks leave the nest. Magpies are generally known to attack cyclists about 100 metres from their nests and pedestrians at about 50 metres.
Now, the important bit. What can you do?
First, while disconcerting that Nature is, for once, kicking back against human occupation – and with fear compounded by images of Tippy Hedren in The Birds (thank you Alfred Hitchcock) – the attack (like the hill) won’t last forever and you will almost certainly hurt yourself more if you fall off your bike than in the, relatively unlikely event, that the bird’s beak touches your skin.
Bicycle Victoria has a six-point list of advice, which encouragingly begins with: “Avoid the swoop area. Try riding in a different direction.” Next on their list is: “It is better to dismount and walk your bike past a swoop area.” And then: “Put up warning signs for others who may not be aware that there are swooping birds in the area.” … which isn’t going to help you.
BV’s next three points might be worth considering:
- Travel in a group. Most birds only swoop individuals.
- Be confident and face a swooping bird; usually they only attack people facing away from them. Magpies appear to be dissuaded from swooping when they are being watched, so try sticking ‘eyes’ on the back of your helmet.
- Do not panic and run. It will only encourage a swooping bird to continue its attack.
Apart from the “try sticking ‘eyes’ on the back of your helmet”.
In October 2009, some CSIRO researchers (according to Bicycle NSW that’s who the intrepid fellow are) made two films. Described by one blogger as “the most useful bike video I have ever watched”, the first film shows the diligent fellows methodically test various helmet attachments and wearing no helmet with the unflagging support of a magpie that seems to have taken up residence in their lab car park.
Using as their springboard a ‘seminal’ research paper from 1997 by Renate Kreisfeld of Flinders University – ‘Injuries involving magpies’ – the short film Killer Magpie was a record of the researchers’ tests of the efficacy of various helmet adornments in repelling magpie attacks.
Tested were: plain helmet, helmet with paper ‘eyes’ stuck on the back, helmet with cable ties (“Cable tie guy”), helmet with coloured pipe cleaners (“Pre-school special”) and no helmet.
The legal solution? Whack a whopping great wig over your helmet. Or just take your shiny little helmet off for a bit ...
The conclusion: taking your helmet off stops the magpie attacking.
Like when Barry Marshall swallowed a gutful of bacteria to prove it was the cause of stomach ulcers, the final test of this hypothesis is performed by a brave man who removes his helmet mid-attack to prove it’s the helmet that is provoking the maggie.
In Killer Magpie 2, made a few days later, the fellows undertook “Further studies on the efficacy of helmet adornments in repelling magpies”.
Developing the results of Killer Magpie, they find that the best option of all is to wear a big curly wig over your bike helmet … which is also the more legal option. Ah yes. So the researchers’s ultimate conclusion is in fact: “Helmet adornments not only look silly … they can really work!”.
Bret's hair helmet turns out to be the proven-on-film-so-it-must-be-so best defence against magpie attacks.
Which brings me to the wonderful Bret (“Brit? Like Britney?” “No, Bret, like Bret”) McKenzie and his secret project in Flight of the Conchords, which turns out to be a bike helmet that looks like hair. I always knew that boy was on a righteous path with his special project, which features right up front in Season 1, Episode 1.
If you’re really concerned about swooping magpies, there are maps available online that show where the birds are. For example, the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment Magpie Swoop Map and the 2011 Adelaide Magpie Cyclist Attack Map.
