our sweetcorn was coming on in leaps and bounds and was almost ready to pick we went to the allotment one day and about a third of the cobs had been stripped it was the bloody magpies so we took off the ruined ones and netted the lot apparantly the birds sit on the tops of the cob gather the leaves in their beaks and jump down to strip it and once the cob is exposed they scoff the lot (one of the old boys at the plot told me that!!) clever little buggers (the birds i mean)