The E-Sylum:  Volume 8, Number 40, September 18, 2005, Article 14

THE MAGPIE THEORY OF COIN DISPERSION

Ralf W. Böpple of Stuttgart, Germany writes: "Regarding the
story about a coin find in Turkey (as forwarded and commented
by Arthur Shippee and Dick Johnson in last week's E-Sylum),
I suppose unusual and unexplainable finds are not so out of the
way as they may seem. One fine day a few years ago, I found a
coin lying in the grass under a tree in the backyard of my
grandparents' home. It was a late 19th century gold sovereign
with the bust of Queen Victoria, clean and in extremely fine to
about uncirculated condition. Nobody could come up with a
reasonable explanation of how it may have gotten there. We
asked all the neighbors, but nobody was missing a gold coin.

It was finally concluded by my grandmother that a European
magpie, a bird which is commonly known to steal shiny things
and hide them in its nest, might have found the coin somewhere,
maybe on a window sill or a balcony. The bird may have taken
it and lost it later on while sitting in the tree in our backyard. The
coin was not of historical value, so no museum or state archaeologist
needed to be contacted. The coin ended up in the family vaults.
For years, I looked at the magpies flying around my grandparents'
place with a certain feeling of gratitude.

However, a while ago an ornithologist told me that while the
story about larcenous magpies is very old, it nevertheless appears
to be a popular myth. During a field study, hundreds of nests of
magpies in urban areas were searched, and no shiny things were
found in there.

Since there is definitely nobody interested in increasing the number
of tourist visitors to our backyard, and since any scheme to raise
the value of the property by igniting a gold rush would involve gold
in the form of nuggets instead of sovereigns, this coin find remains
a complete mystery until today. "

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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