Misha puts people into three categories:
1. Those he is wary of, but respects. Examples include myself and some of my ornithologist colleagues. He knows that I can take his tail or a foot, so he doesn't let me handle him freely. He doesn't attack me or try to bite me, he politely takes food from me and doesn't curse at me. But he also doesn't let us handle him. Any veterinary manipulations have to be carried out by me or my colleagues. Such displays of power are the reason why he is afraid of us and respects us.
2. Those who are allowed to handle Misha. He sits in their lap and on their hands, tries to get in their car and learn new words from them. I don't know how Misha chooses such people. It might depend on their voice timbre or whether or not they have cigarettes. He also knows who loves him and can tell the difference between being chased away gently and being seriously told to go away using the F-word, which he knows very well.
3. Those who have zero respect from Misha. He will bite them, curse at them, tell them things like "I'll kill you" and "get the F out of here!!". Such people piss him off, making him talk.
That's right, Misha starts talking when he is pissed off by something. Otherwise he remains silent or sings magpie songs.
A typical magpie scream is an alarm call and a danger warning. For example, Misha yells like that when he sees dead quails.
And now the answer to the most popular question under yesterday's video:
"Гуля К
20 hours ago (edited)
Tell us how you met the "crazy zoologists" and the rest of your friends."
Telling about the rest of my friends would take up way too much space here. I know some of them through bird of prey discussions. Maria Markina, Ksenia from Sirin, Katya and Zhenya - I met all of them on the mybirds.ru forum.
I founds some of my friends thanks to Pikabu and Yoll - they are subscribers that have attended meetings with Yoll or responded to some of my requests. For example, Yegor "The Programmer" Grigoriy.
The crazy zoologists were an inevitable accident. I think I would have met them anyway sooner or later, since I started keeping terrariums and regularly went to the zoo to see my wise dinosaur friends I've known from school, for advice and support.
But one day someone wrote to me, asking me questions about his pet great grey owls he took from a nursery. It turned out to be Andrey Zagorinsky. He got his answers, and it so happened that my beekeeper colleague from work was selling honey, which Andrey needed for his butterflies. Because of that honey, we met in person and got to know each other. Andrey brought along a box of caterpillars "as a test", thus getting us addicted to caterpillars... He did it on purpose! That damn drug lord! This happened about a month before he got a job at the Moscow Zoo. There he met Gatilov and showed him to me. At so it took off. A chain reaction happened: I followed those guys everywhere, and when I'd arrive at a new place, they'd point their fingers at me and say my name. The people on duty would respond with "hi nice to meet you". Then my friends would point at me again and say, "Yolka the eagle-owl!" And then the reaction would be, "Ohhhh! Yolka the eagle-owl! So it's YOU!"
As for friends from my student past, before the birds, I have almost none. There's just Polina - my former classmate and possibly the only person close to me who's got nothing to do with animals. A loyal friend who is always there to support me and knows all my quirks since our childhood. I still get along well with the rest of my classmates, but I barely interact with them, mostly just sending them good wishes on special occasions.
My "dinosaur friends" from school are people who were already adults when I was a student. They can be seen as teachers and mentors - kind and wise. They know that a girl might need a bucketful of frogs more than hugs and a potful of soup. That it's better to spend money on a gecko than on getting your nails done. And that the most useful food is not meatballs but crickets.