Magpies have become an increasingly common bird sighted in Yellowknife and elsewhere in the NWT.
For bird enthusiast Reid Hildebrandt, they're an added threat to songbirds.
"Magpies are quite adept at finding and raiding songbird nests for their eggs and flightless young," he said.
Hildebrandt added that although magpies have tended to live on the prairies and the Great Plains, they've started becoming quite a presence in towns and cities as well.
"They highly prefer being next to human development here up in the Northwest Territories," he said.
That said, there isn't much in the way of data when in comes to monitoring their seemingly growing population, however. According to the GNWT, in 2019, there were hundreds of species of birds reported in the territory, but only an estimated six per cent of them remain within territorial boundaries year-round.
Songbirds are major predators of insects, Hildebrandt noted, but he hasn't noticed any significant change in the insect population here.
In terms of controlling a seemingly growing magpie population, Hildebrandt said he doesn't have an answer.
"Magpies are quite unliked by many people and I'm sure that some people take it upon themselves to diminish the population a little bit if they're in a rural setting, but as far as I know, magpies would have legal protection."
His best guess would be that the birds have already had an impact on the ecosystem here.
"Now that magpies are in every neighbourhood, I'm not sure how much more their population can increase. They would have their own threshold, their own carrying capacity," he said. "But various people's experiences would suggest they're having a fairly heavy impact on the ecosystem currently."
Shannon Graf, the communications officer for the Department of Environment and Climate Change (ECC) wrote an email to Yellowknifer explaining they have not, at this time, done any research into magpies.
"That said, the northward expansion of animals like magpies, crows, white-tailed deer, cougar and others (even grizzly bears) continues to be expected in response to a warming and changing climate," Graf stated.