Front-Yard Magpies.wav

Magpies are intelligent birds, quickly training humans to feed them. Against a backdrop of parrots and noisy-miners (0:52 for a clear example), a couple of magpies on my front lawn are eating cheese scraps I threw out. One turns to face me (about 1 meter away) and starts carolling, later when the cheese runs out he gets a bit grumpy (1:30) and starts to squak. The light grunting you can hear is also a magpie sound (three magpies are eating most of the time), they are communicating amongst themselves. Toward the end (1:18 + 1:34 one magpie flys away then another). Recording chain: Rode NT4 (stereo mic in blimp) - Sound Devices MixPre (Mic preamp) - Edirol R44 (digital recorder, was 24 bit @ 44.1 kHz, changed to 16 bit for upload).