Identification - It is a crow-sized black-and-white bird with a long, wedge-shaped tail and black bill. It has large white patches in the flight feathers and white at the base of the wings.
Morsels - Outside the nesting season, the Black-billed Magpie can form roosting flocks of 40 or 50 birds, and spend the night in trees or riparian willow thickets. All birds roost and most birds roost at night. Some choose to roost singly while others roost in flocks of a few to millions of birds. The now extinct Passenger Pigeon formed the largest roosting flocks of all land birds, their roosts consisting of literally billions of birds covering many square miles.