Nicely done, Amos. In Oz, what we call a magpie is a quite different species of bird, and the only stuff it collects is made into (sometimes large) nests; I've seen all sorts of strange things in our magpie nests.

But its carolling is far and away something much more than describable as idle chatter. Many years ago, some Pom wonk described the singing of Australian birds ("all" of them, mind you) as merely harsh squawking. He'd obviously never woken to the sounds of magpies, which means he'd probably never been in any part of SE Oz.

Leaving aside such maestri as lyrebirds, some researchers have taped entire "Dawn Chorus" sets from various forested places in our east. A dawn chorus consists of the opening territorial calls of all the species in the area. The researchers found that all the subsequent calls were harmonically related to the pitch of the first call for the day, irrespective of species. They even altered the pitch of the tapes they played to initiate the dawn chorus and found that all the (real) birds subsequently altered the pitches of their calls to fit harmonically with the first caller.

Cheers, Rowan