November 10th, 2024Kyle’s Rant  

Although we have a family of magpies at TL HQ,  I have never been attacked, that is until a recent trip to Melbourne.  

My relationship with the birds was galvanised during the pandemic. Each day after toiling away on the paper, in the cut and thrust of lockdowns, Donna and I would sit down with a drink on the balcony, rain, hail or shine and feed our black and white feathered friends.  

At the time we would barely see anybody. We would collect our groceries at the Click and Collect in Woodend and then spend half an hour cleaning them on the  stove hob and in the sink. I would light up the hob after the food cleaning exercise to kill bugs and spray the sink with Glen 20.

The booze was delivered courtesy of the good people at Cellarbrations in Daylesford and it would spend a few days on the back deck de-bugging.  

Exercise was with a mask around the Glenlyon Reserve and an excursion to  get out of the house was a drive through Daylesford with the air conditioning on reticulation as recommended by a nurse we know.

The world was upside down and if  a pig had flown past the window, I would have simply said ‘G’day’.

But back to the backyard birds. They were all individually named – there  was Uncle Bulgaria, Dumper Duck and Puffy just to name a few. It was a multi generational family of maggies that even during the breeding season never swooped, I  have heard they do recognise individual people.

Yes, it was crazy times and at times I  thought I was going crazy, but things were what they were.

Speaking of crazy and before I bore you with the rest of my magpie yarn, scan the  QR code below to check a battle myself and my nephew had.

It was during an alien invasion at a recent virtual reality experience and will also give you some insight into the vocal levels during the magpie attack.  

But back to bird skirmishes. I have chuckled my fair share of times at the  “funniest home video style” antics of folks I have seen being attacked both on video and IRL.

The screams, gyrations and at times, flesh wounds, as folks throw themselves on the ground, crash their bikes and do the ‘hands in the air’ dance.

Now it was my turn. As I walked around the corner under a low set of trees in a garden bed, I felt the first contact of the claws on my head.

My first reaction was to put my sunglasses on my head as swoop two commenced with that horrible snapping noise they make with their beaks.  

My second defence was to yell out “I know Uncle Bulgaria and his family” as I  got lower into the garden.

There seemed to be no escaping this pair of protective dive bombers, I kept running and stumbling into the undergrowth.

At one stage, in an  effort to pull some speed off my combination headfirst run and breakdance move, I  hooked my arms around a tree trunk to slow me down and skun up my wrists, only  to look up and see the mad bastard birds were  only a metre from my face.  

I did a backwards worm through the undergrowth that would have won at the Olympics, and then that was it, I was  obviously at the limit of their protection  zone.

I finally emerged from the urban jungle bloodied, bruised and breathless, with a large  audience looking on at the man responsible for the blood curdling screams.  

Embarrassing bird rant over.