Magpie Mimicry

Hi all,

With violent rain storms penetrating my dining room ceiling, closing the Geelong to Melbourne Rd and turning the normally dry western plains sheep paddocks into prime snipe habitat we headed out last Saturday through numerous rain squalls, heading for a pelagic trip out of Port Macdonnell in S A. Sadly the wind and rain persisted and by 0800 on Sunday the pelagic was declared a non-event.

Not all was bad though. I found that the little bakery in Dunkeld houses one of the world’s great meat pie makers and that one of the best mimics lives close by. With my meat pie in hand we stopped for lunch at the local Lion’s Park, just on the west side of Dunkeld, and were serenaded by a local Magpie who went through a large repertoire of calls.

I had never heard the mimicry skills of the Magpie and, after visiting that font of all videos, You-tube, where a number of Magpies pretend to mimicry, I still have not heard anything to compare with this particular bird. The calls though soft, were as pure as a true Magpie dawn-song and 100% accurate to their origin.

We were offered Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo, Pied Currawong, human voices, a dog barking, Kookaburra, some small twitterings along the line of wrens or thornbills and a Grey Shrike-thrush. He/she went over and over the full repertoire for about 5 minutes as we sat and had lunch. The human and dog sounds were so accurate that it took us some time to convince ourselves that they were actually coming from the bird, not from some distant dog owner and their pet.

So if you are traveling through Dunkeld in western Victoria, stop for a pie and eat it in the Lion’s Park with the Magpie. He/she may not sing for us again though because we drove off without paying for the concert with an offering of food, especially not any of the flaky pastry from atop my pie (smile).

Cheers

Jenny ===============================

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