Yellow-billed Magpie
A colony of Yellow-billed Magpies lives communally year round, feeding, socializing and collectively mobbing predators. This magpie has found in vacant city lots and weedy storage yards a substitute for habitats it lost to intensive agriculture. It has become a city bird but keeps away from places where people gather.

The Yellow-billed Magpie is a slightly smaller version of the Black-billed Magpie but has a yellow bill and a bare yellow area of skin behind its eye. It has large white wing patches and a long, wedge-shaped, iridescent greenish-black tail. The juvenile has a blackish beak and lacks the bare face patch. The Yellow-billed Magpie's call is a raucous qua-qua-qua and a querulous quack.

The Yellow-billed Magpie consumes a diet of about half insects, especially grasshoppers, but also eats grains, acorns, fruits and carrion. Believed to mate for life, it breeds in small loose colonies, with each pair in a different tree prefering tall trees usually about 50 feet. It builds its nest near the tree top on a small limb far out from the trunk, sometimes in a mistletoe clump. The Yellow-billed Magpie occasionally reuses a nest but usually builds a new one each year in sycamore, oak, cottonwood or digger pine.

The Yellow-billed Magpie is a year-round resident in California's Central Valley and adjacent foothills. The ranges of the Yellow-billed Magpie and the Black-billed Magpie do not overlap. The Yellow-billed Magpie prefers oak savannas, oak woods, riverside growth, ranches and suburbs.
Yellow-billed Magpie Range Map

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