Red-backed Shrike (Crossley Guide)

Dear Readers, the Red-Backed Shrike (Lanius collurio) was once a common visitor to the south of England, and bred here in some numbers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Alas, it is now rare enough to cause a surge in bird watchers when it visits, and with only four breeding pairs in the whole of the United Kingdom over the past few years, it is functionally extinct as a breeding bird.

What happened? Well, you may know shrikes as ‘butcher birds’  – they are formidable predators of more or less any animal smaller than themselves, and the corpses of their victims are impaled on thorns to be eaten later. It’s worth remembering that this is not a large bird – it’s somewhere between the size of a sparrow and a starling. However, what it lacks in size in makes up in attitude.

Red-backed shrike (Photo by Antonios Tsaknakis, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons)

Thomas Bewick, the engraver of birds, suggested that ‘their courage, their appetite for blood and their hooked bill entitle them to be ranked with the boldest and more sanguinary of the rapacious tribe’. Even their Latin name, Lanius, means ‘I tear or rend in pieces’. At the RSPB reserve at Minsmere, Red-backed Shrikes used to fly into Sand Martin nests, take the chicks and impale them on barbed wire, much to the disgust of visitors (Birds Britannica, by Mark Cocker and Dominic Couzens). However, the shrikes favourite food is  large insects – crickets and grasshoppers, fat caterpillars, huge beetles are all taken with great enthusiasm. Alas, we all know what’s been happening to insects of all kinds, let alone the big hunky ones.

Another important factor in earlier years (and possibly even now) was egg-collecting – Red-backed Shrikes have particularly beautiful eggs in a huge variety of colours and patterns, so multiple birds were likely to have their eggs stolen. One notorious collector (again, from Birds Britannica) took almost 900 eggs of this species during a 50 year ‘career’.

However, this is a bird that climate change could actually benefit. The Red-Backed Shrike is widespread in the warmer parts of Europe, and seems to enjoy long, hot summers, so with a bit of habitat recreation maybe these birds could be enticed to recolonise. They are spectacular creatures, and maybe they can be enticed back. A few pairs still choose to breed here every year, so maybe it’s not impossible. And overall, Red-backed Shrikes are not endangered, either in Europe or globally, so at least there’s that.

I’m sure you’d love to hear what a Red-backed Shrike sounds like (just in case one turns up in the garden and starts impaling things), so here you go…it’s surprisingly twittery!

And look, a poem! Oh my goodness. I am struck dumb, for once. See what you think.

Shrike Tree by Lucia Perillo

Most days back then I would walk by the shrike tree,
a dead hawthorn at the base of a hill.
The shrike had pinned smaller birds on the tree’s black thorns
and the sun had stripped them of their feathers.

Some of the dead ones hung at eye level
while some burned holes in the sky overhead.
At least it is honest,
the body apparent
and not rotting in the dirt.

And I, having never seen the shrike at work,
can only imagine how the breasts were driven into the branches.
When I saw him he’d be watching from a different tree
with his mask like Zorro
and the gray cape of his wings.

At first glance he could have been a mockingbird or a jay
if you didn’t take note of how his beak was hooked.
If you didn’t know the ruthlessness of what he did–
ah, but that is a human judgment.

They are mute, of course, a silence at the center of a bigger silence,
these rawhide ornaments, their bald skulls showing.
And notice how I’ve slipped into the present tense
as if they were still with me.

Of course they are still with me.

* * *

They hang there, desiccating
by the trail where I walked, back when I could walk,
before life pinned me on its thorn.
It is ferocious, life, but it must eat,
then leaves us with the artifact.

Which is: these black silhouettes in the midday sun,
strict and jagged, like an Asian script.
A tragedy that is not without its glamour.
Not without the runes of the wizened meat.

Because imagine the luck!–to be plucked from the air,
to be drenched and dried in the sun’s bright voltage–
well, hard luck is luck, nonetheless.
With a chunk of sky in each eye socket.
And the pierced heart strung up like a pearl.