Great Grey Shrike
There’s good reason why these are known as ‘butcher birds’ – how they deal with their prey is a particularly gruesome affair…
Find out why the so-called ‘butcher bird’ lives up to its name!
On the school run, my teenage daughter used to delight in regaling me with tracks from her favourite indie music. Over the years not many tunes stuck, but quite unexpectedly, just the other day, a line from one of them trickled through the moving stave of my consciousness. It’s from the track ‘Dino Damage’ by Miniature Tigers, and set to an unsettlingly gentle melody it goes like this:
“…If you hold on, they’ll bite your fingers off
And tear you limb from limb. It’s second nature to them”
This wandering fragment of verse must have come to rest because I was looking at a picture of a Great Grey Shrike. These are fabulous birds, but for most of us their searingly predatory nature manages to escape our experience, since they are rare birds, with just 50-70 spending the non-breeding season in the UK each year.
We normally just admire them on a high perch above the heath or moor where they come to winter, and we rarely see them in action. The same sanitised wonder applies to those prehistoric dinosaurs we love so much.
Had a human uman ever met a T. rex there would have been only one result, and it would have been very quick, very bloodsoaked and completely lacking in glamour.
The Great Grey
Shrike is, like its very distant relative the
T. rex, a specialised meat-eater. Every time it eats, something dies, except for the rare occasions that the bird scavenges (it has been known to eat the flesh of a dead cow!)
This spells bad news for voles, mice and shrews, in particular. Their destruction isn’t pretty. It takes about a minute to kill a vole, a mammal that roughly fills the palm of your hand.
The shrike despatches it by biting the back of the neck multiple times until the spinal cord is ruptured. This can take many attempts (a shrike once killed a rat after biting it 117 times) and all the time, the vole will attempt to get away from the shrike and bite it back. The shrike does not hold the mammal under the feet but must dodge and peck until it hits exactly the right spot. It’s a death dance, with bleeding and suffering.
Once the vole is incapacitated, the shrike will carry it in its feet to a nearby perch to be ‘processed.’ With such a large prey item, that means wedging the carcass into the