Sexual Size Dimorphism and Morphological Sex Determination in the Black-billed Magpie in South Korea (Pica pica sericea)

Statistical tools for determining sex in the sexually monomorphic black-billed magpie based on morphological characters have been developed based on studies of European and North American populations. However, since no morphological method has been developed for black-billed magpies in Korea, it has been difficult to conduct field studies that require information about the sex of individuals. We present two discriminant equations for determining sex of second-year (SY) and after-second-year (ASY) magpies in north- and midwestern part of South Korea. Based on morphological measurements on 105 SY (56 females, 49 males) and 72 ASY (36 females, 36 males) individuals, we found body mass, wing chord, and head length to be the most useful features for morphological sex determination. The accuracy of our method was 86.5% for SYs and 93.1% for ASYs, which is similar to values reported previously from American and European magpies. Since the equations contain morphological traits which are only minimally susceptible to seasonal variation and measurement errors, our discriminant equations should be both useful and robust for sex determination on black-billed magpies in the northern and mid-western regions of South Korea.