Magpie

Lovely composition, John. I like the pose of the Magpie and the perch is awesome. The bit of grass in the foreground gives context to the oof bg and everything works nicely.

Nice composition, and a beauty of a bid. Well done, John.

I like this, too! Well done!

A wonderful composition. I especially like the bird's head turn and similar angle of tail and barbed wire.

Great shot John, I noticed right away the parallel tail and barbed wire, that makes this shot special imo.

Very fine image!
Great pose, nice detail, and the perch/wire is very interesting. I wonder if you could recover some detail in the whites to improve this nice image even more? It's a tough exposure you handled well, though.
Sandy

These guys are quite common around here but very difficult to get a good photo of them as they are so darn wary. So I really appreciate the nice job you did here, love the post and wire perch, classic and attractive!!! It might just be the small view, but their does seem to be a slight sharpening halo on the head area, barely detectable but might be worth tinkering a little with that. One of the nicest Magpie photos I have seen in a while. BTW I heard that this species has been renamed, it is now an American Magpie.

As nice a Black-billed Magpie shot as has been posted in a while. Excellent comp, great perch and an interesting head turn. I wonder if you could tease a little more detail out of the whites and blacks?

Wonderful shot John - great setting and head turn

cheers
Rob

Really like the rustic feel to this John. Nice head turn and background, great perch and overall setting. These birds are notoriously difficult to expose well and you've done that. Like the iridescence also. I agree with Gary that there's a very narrow but noticeable halo where the blacks of the bird meet the background - likely fixable by resizing bilinear instead of bicubic and then doing selective sharpening after careful masking. Very nice magpie image.

John,
beautiful comp, pose of the Magpie and colors. Very well done.

Comp on this one is top notch IMO John! Love the rustic perch and head turn on the magpie! Tis has a very western/southwestern feel to it with that perch.

I like the very natural composition. Although a common bird it's not easy to get an image showing the full range of feather colours as you've achieved here. Graham

Sweet. Like it right down to the rusted barb wire, the line of incidentally really completes the comp here.

Composition, exposure, nice head turn, interesting perch - makes for an outstanding image.
May