When I was about 10, we had a semi tame magpie for a while, everyone who met it fell in love with it - it was so personalable and interested in humans. During

When I was about 10, we had a semi tame magpie for a while, everyone who met it fell in love with it - it was so personalable and interested in humans. During a storm it had fallen out of a nest in our garden and I spotted it when I saw my cat approaching it. Tiny and hungry, it was happy to be fed and took bits of cat food from a pair of tweezers. The next day another fell out - there was no way for us to reach the nest to return either of them, so we brought it in too. It resolutely refused to eat and thought we were terrifying, even though it's relative would eat in front of it. It died quickly overnight, though we were not sure how long it had been out the nest. --- The first magpie, we named Marilyn as I had just learnt the name had normally been a male name before Marilyn Monroe, so I thought it a good unisex name. It grew really attached to us - we'd feed it as often as it wanted, and it would perch on some bamboo rods that my father fixed up in the kitchen and chatter to use while we were talking. It would fly to my shoulder and back when asked to, and enjoyed being stroked and scratched. Each night it would fly to a box we had so we could put it to bed and keep it safe from our cats (who generally seemed pretty uninterested as it grew bigger). For a period we would take it into the garden each day, and it would fly off and return as much as it wanted, coming back into the kitchen through our open door. Then one day it suddenly learnt how to eat and drink by itself - the next day it flew off and we never knowingly saw it again. I later read that in the middle ages they were common pets - but they would clip their wings for the first few months so they lose the urge to fly away. I am sad it left, but glad we didn't, I hope it lived a good magpie life somewhere. I still say 'Marilyn' to magpies I meet, just in case it is them :)