Pesky magpies are just being magpies

I have some sympathy for Wendy Brown, the Carterton woman who was attacked by a magpie while cycling.

The results of the attack looked particularly nasty, with blood pouring from a wound on her face. I have no love for these particular birds, largely stemming from my experiences as a child, when I would walk a very long way home from school to avoid them terrifyingly swooping on me.

But I have some sympathy for the magpies too. Protecting their territory and their nests is what they do. They're not being mean, they're being magpies.

But magpies are a pest and the Greater Wellington Regional Council has a programme to control them, so the magpies are being trapped, and presumably, destroyed.

Last week another bird-life debacle was reported in the Bay of Plenty Times, as al fresco diners on Mount Maunganui's Marine Parade were struggling to keep scavenging seagulls out of their meals.

Cafe workers fed up with replacing seagull-sullied meals and coffees had taken to scaring the birds away with water pistols.

But the seagulls, too, are just being seagulls, and doing what they have done long before anyone in Mount Maunganui knew what al fresco dining was - scavenging for food.

If you lived in Auckland and liked to eat your lunch at one of the inner-city parks or squares, you would be making the same complaints about the pigeons. Someone I know once had a sandwich plucked out of their hand by a cheeky bird and has been nervy around flying, feathered creatures ever since.

We have few genuinely dangerous animals in New Zealand - the odd shark, some dogs, and that's about it.

I wonder whether that's why we're not very good at accepting that when you share a space with wild animals, sometimes we can't have it all our own way.