IF YOU ARE interested in business, politics or wildlife, it pays to watch the opportunists. The specialists (those with long-term strategies) find themselves suddenly out of fashion when times change. A woodpecker, for example, cannot make a living in the inner city. This is known as the tender trap of specialisation.

But for others, every change represents an opportunity — a thought that occurred to me this week with a wonderful epiphany of magpievirtuosity.

I like magpies. I do not hold magpies responsible for the ruination of British countryside, nor for the decline in British songbirds. The blame for that goes to another bipedal opportunist.

Magpies have become pantomime villains, the Dick Dastardly of conservation. I used to live in a seriously magpie-heavy area: it also supported six breeding species of warbler. Magpie-blaming is nothing to do with science and observation: it is all about the human need for a villain. And that’s my last word on the subject: magpie-haters are invited to save their postage stamps.

Rather, savour the bird’s genius. I was visiting Port Lympne wildlife park with my older boy this week, and there was a black rhinoceros stretched out and taking its ease. On its back, you’ve guessed it, a magpie, acting like an African oxpecker, beaking its way across the acres of rhino skin and gobbling up the insect life it found there.

Who told an English magpie that an utterly alien bicorned beast was a source of food? What were the thought processes that led from the rhino’s arrival to its place in the magpie’s menu? Whatever the answer, it contains the meaning of magpie life.

Magpies open milk bottles on doorsteps. They help themselves to eggs from egg boxes. They eat animal droppings. They eat walnuts, hammering them open with their hefty crow’s beaks. They take whole pears and fly off with them. They dig four inches into the ground after potatoes. They rub hairy caterpillars on the ground to shave off the indigestible hairs. They smash snail shells for an escargot feast. They turn over waterlily leaves to reach snails and their eggs on the underside. They dig in the sand for mussels and prise them open with their bills. They take rodents. They catch and eat live snakes. They take young trout from ponds. They even catch bats in flight.

In short, magpies are amazing birds. If you want to blame a species for the woes of the countryside, don’t look for magpies. Try the mirror instead.

• A SMALL PATCH of scrubby growth beside the river on a regular dogwalk. And a sudden demented panic: from this little scrap of cover, no fewer than 30 of them, big and whirring, rising up in sudden heart-stopping horror: I know I can’t really fly in any demanding sense of the term, but at least I can whirr in the air for a few yards.

  Pheasants. All over the countryside at this time of year: the doomed squadrons are rising up in panic, shouting tick-up tick-up tick-up; the pheasant equivalent of “don’t panic, Mr Mainwaring”. Otherwise, they are flinging themselves under the wheels of passing cars in an effort to carpet every lane in Britain with pheasant feathers. Have you ever wondered how pheasants get to be so stupid? The answer is that they never get the chance to be anything else.

  Pheasants are almost invariably young birds, released into the countryside in annual millions, and before they get a chance to learn their undertail coverts from their tarsal joint, they are blasted out of the skies by our brave sportsmen. They never get the chance to learn about life and how to live it without panic.

  If you go to bird reserves, or other places where there is no shooting, pheasants grow up and become mature and capable birds. They work out that roads are dangerous, they learn how to breed and raise baby pheasants without the assistance of a gamekeepers, and they survive without artificial feeding. It’s not the pheasants’ fault that they’re stupid.

  But are they? The fact that young pheasant is so extremely good at dying has made for this strange association with humans. The death of pheasants gives humans pleasure: and so humans rear pheasants, feed them and cosset them. Are pheasants not working an evolutionary ploy of genius by exploiting the foibles of humankind?

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