About magpies and flawed research projects...

The careful reader might have noticed that, until recently, we had a different magpie image on our Web page. Unfortunately, showing that image constituted a major flaw in the presentation of our research as the bird we showed wasn't one of the thing-collecting kind. Fortunately, in the Internet age, nothing remains uncovered. The following mail kindly pointed out our flaw:

Return-Path: 
Sender: crawley@dstc.edu.au
Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 10:15:50 +1000
Organization: CRC for Distributed Systems Technology
X-Accept-Language: en
To: kielmann@cs.vu.nl
Subject: Magpies

Thilo,

I was browsing the VU research web pages, and hit on the picture of the
"magpie" on the
Albatross web.  Do you realise that you've got a picture of an
Australian magpie there?
I don't think it is even the same genus as the European magpie.  The
Australian magpie doesn't
have the habit of collecting shiny objects like the European magpie.  It
is very territorial, and
will "swoop" anything that comes near its nest tree during the nesting
season.

Ornithologically yours,

-- Steve

When I received the mail, it was a nice and sunny summer morning. As this is considered a rare case for Amsterdam, I didn't really feel like working. Some entertaining hours of Web browsing later, I came across a site entitled The Aviary, dedicated to ravens, crows, and other corvidae, part of which are our dear magpies. For the interested viewer, they also provide a magpie image gallery showing all the subtle differences between magpies from all around the world. So, I could have known better...

To conclude: quality research always starts with a decent literature survey ;-)

Last updated: June 29, 2000, by Thilo Kielmann / URL: http://www.cs.vu.nl/albatross/