Born to be wild: An investigation into Australian magpie swooping by Blue Mountains, NSW

The Australian magpie is known for being aggressive and swooping people every spring. Do magpies mean to hurt us? I decided to answer this question using mathematics.

At my school there is a bad and dangerous magpie called Mr Swoopsalot. I observed where he swooped, and who he swooped and formed a hypothesis that he targeted tall, solid men who were bald or had thin hair. I wondered if all magpies were like this.

I designed a survey to test my hypothesis, and made a QR code and flyer. I went to the park and asked people to do my online survey. I put flyers around town, talked to kids and parents at school and community festivals. After a few weeks, someone saw my flyer and posted it online and it went viral! After 24 hours I had 31,432 responses from 70 countries around the world!

My research was about Australian magpies, not the other kind of magpie that lives overseas, so my analysis looked at 20,573 Australian responses. The number of people doing the survey (sample size) means we can be confident about the results. My survey was the first time anyone in Australia had looked at whether your appearance increases your risk of being swooped.

Research findings:
* Bald men are twice as likely to be swooped than people with other hairstyles (30% Vs 15%)
* People over 6 feet tall are twice as likely to be swooped than people less than 5.3 feet tall (21% Vs 10%).
* A high Body Mass Index (BMI) increases your chances of being swooped (11% underweight; 14% normal; 17% obese)
* Males are a bit more likely to be swooped than females (16% Vs 13%)
* 11% of people swooped by magpies were hurt.

The survey also asked people if they like magpies. There were six times as many people who love magpies than those who hate them. Even those swooped and hurt by a magpie were more likely to love them than hate them.

To show the survey results, I decided to use LEGO to illustrate my data because I didn’t know how to use Excel. I made six 3D charts, with each LEGO dot representing one percent.

After my project was finished, I met ABC News reporter Tom Melville, and he wrote a story about my work.
[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-09/magpies-swoop-bald-more-often-survey-finds/103297520] Lots of people were interested and the story was covered by other media outlets and podcasts in Australia, USA, Poland, The Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Japan, Egypt, and Hong Kong, and social media. My charts helped people learn more about magpie swooping and people were happy to see data shown in a new and different way.

I’ve learned there is so much I can find out about the world through maths. I hope my project helps people understand magpies better, and that people will understand that magpie dads are just looking after their babies. If you take time to make friends with magpies, they learn that you are not dangerous but are their friend.