Skip to main content

An Isabelline Shrike in Dorset

    


 

My birding this year seems to have mainly consisted of hours spent staring into dense vegetation looking for rare warblers. It has, however, delivered six new Warblers for my UK list, something I would not have imagined possible at the start of the year. Shrikes have the very opposite behaviour trait, often perching on the top of a bush in full view. So when a rare Isabelline shrike was discovered in Dorset it seemed like a good opportunity for some fairly laid back birding and photography. I have seen one before, a somewhat bedraggled youngster in foul weather in Devon a few years back.

 

Its location near Gillingham has fond memories for me being very close to where I grew up in the small village of Hindon. My dad was a bus conductor at the time and I have lovely memories of traveling on the bus with him as a small boy on the old Wilts and Dorset double decker bus from Hindon to Zeals a mile or so from Gillingham. Those were the good old days when buses were considered to be a public service and they never seemed to be remotely full up.

 

The Isabelline Shrike is very closely related to the Turkestan shrike, which is also called the Red Tailed Shrike, and the Red backed Shrike. All three were considered conspecific until comparatively recently but are now normally treated as three distinct species. I had excellent views of a Turkestan Shrike a few years back at Bempton Cliffs.  The Isabelline Shrike is hard to tell apart from the Turkestan Shrike, particularly young birds, and a DNA sample can be required to confirm its identity.

 

You may well wonder why, if they are so hard to distinguish, they are considered separate species. Basically, its down to how divergent their DNA is and whether they successfully inter breed. While I can’t argue with the scientific basis of this definition of a species, it can lead to some odd results. For example the common and Artic Redpolls are about to be lumped together as one species even though their appearance is very different.

 

The Issy Shrike, as birders call it, is found in an extensive area between the Caspian Sea and north and central China.  It is migratory wintering in Africa and Arabia. Like all Shrikes it is a ferocious predator of  large insects, small birds, rodents and lizards. Like other shrikes it hunts from prominent perches and impales corpses on thorns or barbed wire as a larder. It breeds in open cultivated country, preferably with thorn bushes. The name comes from the colour, Isabelline, a pale grey-yellow, pale fawn, pale cream-brown or parchment colour.

 

The shrike was located a short way off of the road down a footpath and was pretty much immediately obvious perched high on a large patch of brambles, occasionally dropping down to pick up an insect. Its profile was typically shrike like, being  rather dumpy with a hooked beak and a typically wide bandit like eye stripe.







 

I spent a couple of hours with our rare Asian visitor shooting much too many photographs, what a difference to the old 36 pics on a film days, before heading off home very contented with my latest avian experience.


Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!   

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Albert the Albatross

    High quality framed and unframed prints available at   https://www.etsy.com/shop/BirdlifeStudio If you don't see what you want please ask! What is more improbable -   a)     England’ football team    beating Germany in the knockout stages of a major competition   b)     Seeing an Albatross in England   Actually the answer is a) because it has not happened since 1966 rather than b) as Albert the Albatross, as he is affectionally known, has made a number of passing visits to the UK since 1967!   On Monday evening reports started to emerge of Albert associating with the Gannet colony at RSPB Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire, almost one year after his    last brief visit to the same site. During the intervening period there have been a number of sightings of Albert across Europe, particularly from the Baltic Sea where he appears to have spent much of the last 12 months. In fact there were reports that he had been att...

Ok I'll admit it - I'm in love with Wrynecks and Autumn fun on the farm!

  High quality framed and unframed prints available at   https://www.etsy.com/shop/BirdlifeStudio If you don't see what you want please ask! There are precious few birds that I’ve both seen and photographed well that I will drive 2 hours to see but I will make an exception for my favourite UK bird, the enigmatic Wryneck. No autumn birding in the UK is complete for me unless I have seen at least one of these beauties. So Monday morning found me in the Volvo driving 2 hours to see an exceptionally showy individual located at Exminster Marshes RSPB in Devon.   As it had already been present for a couple of days, I waited for it to be reported before setting off  and so it was near midday when I arrived at the small RSPB car park adjacent to the railway line. It was then a 30 minute or so walk down a pleasant leafy footpath to the welcoming looking Turf hotel. The hotel is next to Turf lock from where stunning views can be had over the river Exe estuary towards Exto...

The Hawfinches of the Forest of Dean

   Hawfinch - Forest of Dean, winter 2017 High quality framed and unframed prints available at   https://www.etsy.com/shop/BirdlifeStudio If you don't see what you want please ask! A highlight of my winter birding is my annual trip to the Forest of Dean to see Hawfinches. I was unable to go last year due to the post-Christmas lockdown so this year’s visit was even more richly anticipated than normal.   Parkend in the Forest of Dean is my usual chosen location for watching Hawfinches. Here the proven technique of using your car as a hide normally works well. I must also say that,  after a number of quite strenuous twitches recently, I was also looking forward to a much more leisurely birding session!   The story of Hawfinches in the UK is, to my mind at least, a fascinating one. It is what is known as an eruptive species meaning that it occasionally erupts from its traditional breeding grounds to invade on mass countries much further away. This is thoug...