If you've ever had the pleasure of encountering Australia's iconic magpies, you know these birds are intelligent creatures. With their striking black and white plumage, loud warbling voices and ...

Magpies can mimic a wide array of animal sounds, including horses. This one in Australia did just that — and fooled someone ...

When Dominique Potvin and her team set out to test a new technology for tracking birds, they didn’t think they were entering into an interspecies game of one-upmanship. Instead, Potvin, an animal ...

When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn’t expect to discover an entirely new social behaviour rarely seen in birds. Our goal was to ...

The magpies showed their smarts by helping one another remove tracking harnesses that scientists carefully placed on them. By Anthony Ham The Australian magpie is one of the cleverest birds on earth.

Researchers tried to attach tracking devices to magpies for a study. But the magpies helped each other to remove them — a possible sign, the scientists say, of altruism in the birds. Birds in ...

For all the vastness of our Outback and bush, most Australians live in urban areas. In cities, we live within an orderly landscape, moulded and manufactured by us to suit our needs. But other species ...