There really is
no appropriate place for this!
I recorded this in 1992, by hanging out of an attic window at about 4:30am. This was as close as I could get to 'Blackie' who always sat high up in the same chestnut tree. The time was dictated by the need to get zero traffic noise. Even then I was at this every morning for about a week!
The MIC was a bog-standard Unidyne B plugged straight into a Casio DA-7 portable DAT machine (cost an arm and a leg in those days). I was getting a bit paranoid about losing this so took a Wave copy from the machine in the late 1990s.
Blackie is actually a copyright infringer. He copied the most notable part of his song from a friend who used to whistle that handful of notes frequently - to everyone's annoyance. However, we forgave Blackie as he'd been hearing it virtually from hatching. You see, he'd fallen out of the nest and Terry (same one as I've mentioned previously) hand reared him. Also, I swear that at a couple of points he's actually laughing!
A final twist was that a couple of years later we saw and heard several young blackbirds with a remarkably similar song.
Warning! This file is about 12M and the audio runs for 8 1/2 minutes.
http://www.archive.org/download/BitsAndPieces/Blackbird.mp3
