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!