A Magpie's Meal
A large gull that had been sailing about gathering its courage finally swooped down to the field for a piece of bread that someone had thrown over the hedge a moment or two before. As soon as the gull came up, it was chased by three jackdaws that dived on &and forced the larger bird to drop its prize. Before the bread was on the ground again, it was recovered by- one of the claws and the other two immediately began to harry the lucky one.. There was only one thing for the jackdaw to do and it did it at once, flying into the heart of a thorn tree where it tried to gobble the bread. Alas, the morsel dropped from its beak, and all three birds sat peering down for a while before going resignedly away. The titbit might have gone to a mouse or a rat or some other ground creature but for a magpie that had evidently been missing nothing. The magpie alighted on the thorn, bobbed for a moment, looked about, hopped a branch lower, looked about again and con- tinued the descent until it was at the foot of the tree and had the bread, It came back up again by easy stages and sat eating the bread in the middle of the tree. I thought the bright one had shown a magpie's shrewd- ness and that for its initiative and cunning it deserved that crust a great deal more than the stupid gull or the villains that had carried out the robbery.
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