Staccato bird call on UK dramas

I’ve been watching a number of UK dramas online - most recently Inspector Linley Murders. Many of them have the same bird in the background - high pitched rapid staccato call. Does anyone know what it is? Is it a parrot??

Thanks

Peafowl? Rich folks liked to have them wandering their vast estates making noise.

I really hope it’s not this one:

sounds like a shorter version of this:

But this is a New Zealand native parrot…

It’s difficult to tell from your description, but maybe a chaffinch or a nightingale?

Magpie?

Not that high pitched, but Uk native and super-staccato.

Blackbird would be my guess.

Those nature sounds are usually inserted into the soundtrack by an artist called the Foley Editor. They are notorious for employing recorded sounds of birds that don’t even naturally occur on the same contiment as the drama being depicted. You always hear common loons in pictures that are set in Louisiana swamps, or cactus wrens in the eastern states. The eastern screech owl is de rigeur in any outdoor nighttime scene. Foley editors have their own favorite bird sounds that render a certain atmosphere to the soundtrack, regardless of the bird itself might ever occur in that habitat. To them, and bird is a bird, and they make sounds fitting to the mood they wish to evoke.

TLE: The bird you hear in rural scenes in every Australian film is the butcher bird, but I never heard a single one in my visit to the outback in that continent.

I once sat in on a tracklay for BBC Holiday (a lifestyle show about holiday destinations and this would have been around 2001). The audio editor was told that if an animal was on screen he should try to find the audio of it. So we got to a shot of a bird in the sky. Neither of us had a clue what it was, and we certainly didn’t have the time to research it, so he found a clip that sounded like it MIGHT come from a bird of that type and size. Who knows if that bird sound would have even existed in that country? But they don’t record sound of all the pictures and the audio would feel empty and dull without these sorts of noises. Not great I know, but it’s all about making something watchable.

In my opinion it’s similar with the row about the BBC filming cutaways of different animals and pretending they are all the same one. If anything, it’s worse…

Nah, every NZ schoolkid knows magpies say Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle

I never realised they’re a totally different family to the European magpies.

Ha! I think it is a European magpie! In NZ we have Australian magpies which as said by Lisiate sound nothing like a European magpie, and are not related. I didn’t know either that they were 2 different species.

So thanks all. Now I can think (briefly) every time I hear it on an English tv programme that I know what it is…

The Japanese version appears to be cicadas. The American western film version is a red-tailed hawk. Even if an eagle is shown on screen.

Tropical jungles in frica or South America seem to have a lot more kookaburras than you might realistically expect.