Magpies are a menace, but they usually don’t take offence to your music.<\/p>\n
The birds are known to swoop on unsuspecting commuters in springtime, but one Canberra cyclist has had a bird pluck his earphone straight from his ear.<\/p>\n
Ash Azra rides the same route to work daily and said the magpies had begun swooping him “every single day” in spring.<\/p>\n
So much so, he started using his phone camera on selfie mode as a rear-view mirror, watching for magpies approaching from behind and attempting to swat or fend them off with his hand.<\/p>\n
However, this morning, a magpie caught him unawares.<\/p>\n
“You can’t look at your phone all the time,” Mr Azra said.<\/p>\n
“The magpie found me off guard and I got attacked.<\/p>\n
“It got me.”<\/p>\n
The magpie swooped in, targeting the earphone in his left ear before flying off.<\/p>\n
Mr Azra’s camera captured the interaction, which lasted less than a second.<\/p>\n
“It was an incredible experience,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Maybe the magpie didn’t like the music I was listening to.”Getting the earphone back<\/p>\n
Mr Azra searched for the earphone for about 10 minutes, with the magpie “attacking me constantly,” he said.<\/p>\n
When he eventually found it, the earphone was still working, without even a scratch.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Mr Azra managed to recover the earphone after the magpie swoop. (ABC News: Mark Moore)<\/p>\n
Mr Azra said he would now invest in cable ties attached to his helmet to stop birds from swooping him.<\/p>\n
“Otherwise, I’m probably going to lose my ear,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I was having fun with the magpie. I wasn’t scared. It’s the bird trying to protect its family.<\/p>\n
“Then I tried to run away as quickly as I could.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Magpies are a menace, but they usually don’t take offence to your music. The birds are known to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185157,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2666,118365,8046,2667,118367,9485,118366,38809,43,118364,44,118368,58289,118369,90204,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-185156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-act","tag-ash-azra","tag-camera","tag-canberra","tag-capture","tag-cyclist","tag-earphone","tag-footage","tag-headlines","tag-magpie","tag-news","tag-selfie-mode","tag-steal","tag-swoop","tag-swooping-season","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}