Iberian Magpie

The Iberian magpie, Cyanopica cooki, is a slender bird of the crow family, Corvidae, about 31 to 35 centimetres long. It has a glossy black cap, a white throat, light grey-fawn underparts and back, and wings and a long tail of 16 to 20 centimetres that are azure blue. Charles Lucien Bonaparte described it in 1850 from a specimen collected in Spain by Samuel Edward Cook, whom the species name honours. It was long treated as the same species as the azure-winged magpie of eastern Asia, which lives about 9,000 kilometres away, until genetic analysis showed the two are distinct. The Iberian magpie lives in the south-west and centre of the Iberian Peninsula, in Spain and Portugal, with occasional records in south-western France and north-western Italy, in pine and broadleaf forest as well as parks and gardens. It feeds in family groups and winter flocks of up to 70 birds on acorns and pine nuts, supplemented with invertebrates, soft fruit and scraps from people. It nests in loose colonies, with about 6.2 eggs a clutch.