Red-Tailed Shrike | Lanius phoenicuroides

Voice

Almost always silent in Europe. On the breeding grounds it gives a hard, rattling chek-chek in alarm and a harsher chair when disturbed. The song is a soft, sustained chatter with many imitations, delivered from a bush top and usually audible only at close range.

Identification

A slim shrike, slightly smaller than a Red-Backed Shrike. The male is the most strongly marked of the three: the crown is warm rufous and stands out clearly against a grey-brown to grey mantle, and below it runs a broad, deep black mask that continues across the lores to the base of the bill. Above that lies a crisp, clean white supercilium. The underparts are white to creamy and often clean; rump and the long, narrow tail are rusty red. The wing usually shows a small white patch at the base of the primaries. Females are duller, with a browner mask, a less sharply drawn supercilium and fine dark vermiculation on the white flanks. Six or seven primary tips show on the closed wing, more than in Brown Shrike but fewer than in Red-backed. In the west of the breeding range birds of the karelini type occur, with a greyer crown and correspondingly less contrast; their status is unresolved.

Confusion species

The rusty red rump and tail separate this bird at once from Red-Backed Shrike, which has a black-and-white tail and a chestnut back. The real task is Daurian Shrike, with which this species was treated as one until this century. On an adult male the difference is clear: Red-tailed is a bird of contrasts — rufous crown against a greyer mantle, a broad mask running across the base of the bill, a sharply drawn white supercilium — while Daurian is pale sandy with almost no difference between crown and mantle, a narrower mask and a diffuse supercilium. On females and first-year birds that difference largely disappears, and many birds cannot be named with certainty in the field; such records are accepted simply as Red-tailed or Daurian Shrike. Brown Shrike is warm brown with a dull brown tail, a much heavier bill and a short hand showing some four primary tips. Two things make it harder still. Birds of the karelini type, which breed mainly along the western edge of the range, recall Daurian Shrike because of their greyer crown. And it is this species in particular that hybridises with Red-Backed Shrike where their ranges meet; the most reliable sign is a tail in which rufous and dark markings run together. Better to leave a bird unnamed than to name it on a single character.

Habitat

Dry, open country at the foot of the Central Asian mountains and far up into them: juniper scrub on mountain slopes, tamarisk along river valleys, thorn scrub in steppe, reed fringes along watercourses and the edges of fields and orchards. It occurs from the plains up to well over three thousand metres, higher than the other shrikes of this group. Everywhere the requirement is bushes with open ground between them: the nest sits low in a thorn bush, hunting is done from a projecting branch, and prey is impaled on thorns and barbed wire.

Range and movements

The breeding range runs from the Kopet Dag and the north-east of the Iranian Plateau through the lowlands and foothills of Central Asia and the western Tien Shan to western Xinjiang, and south to the Hindu Kush and Baluchistan. Its western limit falls just outside the area of these maps: the westernmost breeders sit in the mountains east of fifty-three degrees east, and everything further west involves migrants only. That migration, however, is fully within view: in March and April and again in September and October the species is a familiar bird along the western shore of the Persian Gulf and in the west of the Iranian Plateau, moving to and from the winter quarters in East Africa. In north-west Europe it is a rare vagrant; one of the best-known birds stayed for a month at Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire in the summer of 2022. Iberia has only a few records, among them a much-watched bird at the Tagus estuary in July 2018.

• Breeding (summer)
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

How and when to look

In north-west Europe: August to late November on the coast, with a slim chance in May. Search dune scrub, rough field margins and barbed wire for a shrike hunting from a low perch. Look at the tail first — rusty red, not black-and-white — then at the head: contrast between a rufous crown and a greyer back, and a mask that carries across the base of the bill, both point to this species. Do not judge the bird into the light, because crown colour changes drastically then; walk round if you have to.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened (IUCN: Least Concern). The species is numerous across much of Central Asia and locally benefits from scrub along fields and irrigation channels. For Europe it is a visitor with no conservation status of its own. Exactly how many records there are is hard to say: because this species and Daurian Shrike were long treated as one, a proportion of the older observations can no longer be assigned to either, and in practice the usable series only begins around the turn of the century.

Scientific name

Lanius phoenicuroides | (Schalow, 1875)

Schalow described the species in 1875 as Otomela phoenicuroides; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Lanius was introduced in 1758 by Linnaeus. Lanius is Latin for 'butcher', from shrikes' habit of impaling prey on thorns and barbed wire. phoenicuroides means 'resembling a redstart', after the genus Phoenicurus, from Greek phoinix 'red' and -ouros 'tailed', in reference to the rufous tail. The specimen the first description was based on came from Shymkent, Kazakhstan.