Cave Secrets Solve Magpie Mystery
Foraging flocks of beautiful azure-winged magpies (Cyanopica cyanus) grace Chinese, Korean, and Japanese forests and gardens-and, for some vexing reason, those in distant Spain and Portugal. For years, the 1,800-mile gap between the birds' European and Asian populations sparked much debate between two camps of ornithologists. One camp insisted that Portuguese mariners introduced Asian magpies to the Iberian Peninsula in the 1500s. The other believed that the birds' once-extensive range broke up and shriveled during the last glaciation, between 125,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Aside from the question of location, scientists note that the isolated Euro-birds are clearly a different subspecies from those of Asia. Among other things, they are smaller and lack their Asian brethren's whitish tail tips. Many scientists in the glaciation camp pointed to these characteristics as hard evidence that such evolutionary change could never take place over the mere five centuries posited by the mariner camp.
With a new century came an apparent end to the contention. It now appears that the glaciationists have it. In 2000, the University of London's Joanne H. Cooper published a paper in the journal Ibis documenting the first fossil record of an azure-winged magpie in Europe. Two specimens turned up in caves on Gibraltar at late Pleistocene sites. At one site, campfire charcoal was carbon-dated back more than 44,000 years. The other remains turned up near tools of the type used by Neanderthal man. Previously, azure-winged magpie fossil remains had only been found in China. It appears that those in the mariner camp will have to, well, eat crow.
-Howard Youth
