MAX THE MAGPIE

In the spring of 76, when I was living in the Buddhist center Kagyu Ling in France, someone brought me a young magpie. It had fallen out of the nest but it was nearly full-grown and almost able to fly. They asked me if I would take care of it and I agreed.
My room was on the second floor and had a French door that I kept open day and night. I named the magpie Max, and he passed the nights in a cage by this door and during the day he was with me, sitting on my shoulder on a paper napkin, for he was not exactly continent. I fed him bread soaked in milk and he took to me right away like Iwas his parent. And as a good parent I tried to teach him to fly, simply by pushinghim off my shoulder. He flapped his wings and landed unharmed.
It took only about a week before Max was full grown and one morning I set him on a low branch of a great tree in front of the house. I didn’t see him all day and I thought he might have left, but just before dark I heard him squawking, and there he was, high up in the same tree. He wanted to fly, but this was not like hopping down from my shoulder and he couldn’t make himself do it. I had to rescue him and luckily the tree was easy to climb. When I got level with him he came hopping along the branch and I climbed down with him on my shoulder.
Next day I left him again on a low branch and found him again in the evening high up, but this time he overcame his fear and threw himself into the air – he was flying!

Now I didn’t keep him in a cage at night, but he always slept sitting on top of the door by where his cage had been. A group of noisy young magpies, who were probably his siblings, came by and wanted him to join them, but he had forgotten his ancestry, and after a few days they gave up on him and stopped coming. It was joyful for me to have a friend who was at home in the air and came gliding down from the sky and landed on me when he spotted me. He liked to sit on my shoulder and pick at my ears or sometimes at my nose and even my mouth, very gently.
Max was mischievous and the more upset somebody would be with him the more sure he was to tease them. A woman was sitting outside painting and Max picked up her brush and flew away with it. Once I came into my room and he was on my desk with my pen in his beak. I knew that I had to totally ignore him or he would be out the door. When I had convinced him that I didn’t care whether I lost my pen or not, he put it down.
One of his habits was to hide things. A small silver Buddha disappeared and I suspected a young boy who had admired it, but later I found it tucked in between my clean t-shirts on a shelf. My seat was a reindeer skin and here, tucked in between the hairs, I found small objects like my eraser, my pencil sharpener - and plums! He brought the ripe plums in from the garden and usually picked a hole in them when he tried to push them into a tight place, so they made a mess. I still have the marks, looking like blood, on my ‘I Ching’ book.

Kalu Rimpoche with Max

Often Max would visit Kalu Rimpoche, the old lama who was the head of Kaguy Ling, and who gave him titbits. Rimpoche’s calm and loving nature must have appealed to him. For Max was very sensitive to vibrations; there were some people that he would not allow to get close.
On one of the last warm days in October I had been wondering how Max would sleep when I had to close the door he was sitting on at night, but something happened that gave me other worries. I was standing outside with Max on my shoulder and I looked down at him, enjoying the shine of his metallic black, when he suddenly pecked me hard right in the eye. I think I screamed; the pain was excruciating and Max took off and was gone. I was in constant pain and could hardly sleep for several nights so I wasn’t thinking too much about Max, but he never showed up; it was like this had been his mission and as soon as it was accomplished he left the scene.