Cat! (and the magpie that isn't there!)

Of itself I think this is a nicely fun picture. The cat is sitting just under the bird feeders. Not surprisingly there are no birds around. Any small bird arriving to feed tweets out "Cat!" and flies to other gardens and other feeders.
There is one exception to this. A while back I read "Gifts of the Crow" by John Marzluff and Tony Angell, a scientific book about the intelligence of crows and how those gifts mean there are many similarities between crow behaviour and human behaviour.  One of the similarities is a love of play, including sometimes hazardous games. The book mentions crows pulling the tails of wolves! Well, today I saw a magpie land right in front of this cat, about a metre away. It ate a few seeds from the snow but mostly it just stood there, staring the cat down. The cat twitched a little but continued sitting there. Naturally I grabbed my camera but also naturally the magpie flew off as soon as I pointed my camera!
I saw this behaviour once before, in the summer, with two magpies landing in front of a sitting cat and then hopping closer and closer to the cat.  Again the cat just sat there watching.
My interpretaion is that the cat knows from experience that it can't catch the birds from a sitting position. As we all know cats do not like being laughed at so the cat just sits there ignoring the magpies. Has anyone else seen this or similar?