AN unalloyed treat used to be BBC Radio 4’s Tweet of the Week. As far removed as possible from US President Donald Trump’s obsessive activity, it was birdsong. It married the evocative sound of the featured species, say a fluting blackbird or a cawing rook, with an informative profile of each bird.

Some of the pleasure was lost – at least for the Little Englander writing this – when the ‘Tweet’ moved on to foreign birds.

More recently it returned to British birds, but with a twist. Each species is introduced by a different person, who tells what their chosen bird means to them. The results have been patchy though still, on the whole, a precious, calming couple of minutes on Sunday morning.

But last Sunday’s Tweet was starkly out of step with the others. Astonishingly negative, it was by the author Michael Morpurgo. A former children’s laureate, it was he who wrote the wonderful War Horse. A Morpurgo favourite of mine is This Morning I Met a Whale – about how a whale enters the Thames and communicates with a young boy, alerting him to the need to care for our world. Michael Morpurgo is 100 per cent Good Guy.

His Tweet subject was the magpie, which he introduced as “the bird that never dies”. He started well, making the point, which hadn’t occurred to me, that you never see a dead magpie on the roads. Clever magpie, then. And well done Michael for spotting this survival skill.

But admiration wasn’t Michael’s purpose. He vilified the magpie for killing songbirds, particularly “thousands” of wrens and robins. He characterised its call as “cackling laughter… the harshest of all birdsong”. He went on, perhaps not with these exact words but something very close: “I know the magpie has a right to exist, but I wish it would recognise that robins and wrens have a right to life too.” End of Tweet of the Week.

Michael’s welcome sensitivities appeared to have tipped over into blind sentimentalism. For a magpie can only do what nature – and perhaps behind nature, who knows, God – programmed it to do. In a healthy eco system, specifically in this instance a well-balanced countryside, all species thrive. The whole thing works.

Wrens and robins might be delightful small songsters but they too are predators. Robins will even fight each other to the death. Then think of the blackbird, tugging out a worm. And the thrush, loveliest singer of all, even smashes up the home of its favourite prey to reach and devour the delicacy (alas, poor snail). Yes, red in tooth and claw truly describes nature.

As for the magpie, its iridescent beauty might have been expected to win praise on Tweet of the Week. Its distinctive flight – “steering itself round from wood to wood” as a poet laureate, Cecil Day Lewis, memorably observed – is another striking feature. And of course there’s rich folklore attached to the magpie – “one for sorrow” etc.

But sadly, despite its skill in avoiding becoming road kill, the magpie is far from being “the bird that never dies”. Though strong on our urban fringes, it is not that common in the open countryside, where it is often trapped – and despatched. It does not deserve demonising.