The magpies are out and about right now. It's because the birds, like many other animals that call Colorado home year-round, are preparing for the looming winter.
The black-billed magpies in Colorado are recognizable as large, black birds with blue-green wings, long tails and white feathers on their sides. Magpies are members of the Corvid family alongside birds like crows, jays, nutcrackers and ravens. Corvids are widely recognized for their high intelligence, omnivore diets, loud chatter, stout bodies, long bills and complex social behavior.
Like many birds, magpies tend to isolate more during the spring and summer months when they're nesting. But come fall and winter, as the days get shorter and cooler, they tend to gather in larger groups with their juveniles. These groups are sometimes referred to as a mischief, band or charm.
In larger groups, the magpies experience more safety, warmth, social benefits and greater ease in finding food -- particularly important this time of year.
"Winters are brutal around here, and there's not a plethora of food, so any animal that can store it is way ahead of the game," said Mary Harris, chair of Roaring Fork Audubon.
This storing of food, or caching, typically begins in late summer in Colorado, peaking in September when fruits and seeds are most abundant for birds.
Like many of the corvids, magpies are "clever" in their storage, according to Harris.
"They will even start to dig a hole to bury some seeds or other goodies they found, and if they look around and think they've been spotted by another bird, even their same family member, they will come back later and dig it up and hide it somewhere else," Harris said. "They're being sneaky and spying on each other."
This competition can be made even tighter in dry years like this year.
"In times of drought like we had this year, there are fewer seeds, and (the seeds) always vary. Not every pine tree produces seeds every year," Harris said.
The birds are not picky eaters either: "Magpies will hide pretty much anything edible," Harris said.
As opportunistic eaters, this also includes insects, carrion or animal carcasses, often roadkill, and human food resources, including trash. During the fall, they will cache as much as they can find.
A brutal winter -- as well as climate change, habitat loss, disease and other factors -- can decimate bird populations. While Colorado's population of magpies has been insulated, so far, from some of these factors, Canada jays, one of its Corvid family members, illustrate what could happen.
"Canada jays cache more protein than others, and now that our springs are getting warmer, their food is starting to rot, so they're having trouble making it through the winter," Harris said.
While magpies' autumnal scavenging and caching are similar to many birds, they are among a unique class of birds that exhibit human-like and highly social behavior.
"They're one of the birds known to have funerals," Harris said. "They all know each other in their little community -- they have a hierarchy, there's probably the leader of the pack -- and if one of them dies, up to 40 of them will gather around and have a little funeral."
Harris, who said she's been fortunate enough to witness such an event, said the magpies will gather around and call really loudly for around 15 minutes.
"Then they'll get real quiet and then just start leaving one at a time," Harris said.
These funerals are just one example of how the communal birds are extremely sensitive to the other magpies in their family.