Hike in number of nesting shrike
A treasured Brooke Bond picture card with its painting of a red-backed shrike was one of the things that inspired me to become a birdwatcher.
I still remember teasing the card out of a packet of PG Tips tea as a child and delighting in the shrike’s plumage tones of salmon pink, battleship grey and fox red.
Crafted by wildlife artist Charles Tunnicliffe, the picture conjured dreams of seeing one of these fascinating birds in the wild and perhaps being able to stumble upon its legendary “larder”.
The starling-sized shrike was once known as the butcher bird because of its grisly habit of impaling small mammals and lizards on thorn bushes to make them easier to eat.
I would have to wait until my teens and a trip to the RSPB’S flagship Minsmere reserve on the Suffolk coast to get a close-up view of a dandy male shrike perched on a gorse bush.
Sadly, my prized picture card, mounted lovingly in a collectors’ album, disappeared during a house move many years ago. And the red-backed shrike suffered something of a similar fate.
Since becoming extinct as a nesting bird in the UK during the late 1980s, birdwatchers have had to be satisfied with stumbling on wayward migrating shrikes to and from the Baltic states.
Numbers of these passing birds have declined in recent years, yet studies in the journal British Birds give hope that the red-backed shrike is enjoying a renaissance.
The Rare Breeding Birds Panel reports that a pair attempted to nest in Suffolk in 2019, and that there was also a scattering of birds that year prospecting for nest sites in Devon.
This mirrors the notable recovery of shrikes in the Netherlands where, after a long-term decline between 1980 and 2017, numbers have recently tripled to 610 pairs.
Birds drifting from the Low Countries during migration times are likely to account for the increased numbers of shrike sighted across Britain in 2020.
The count of 207 individual birds represents the highest tally for nearly a decade. Hopefully, some will stay and nest.
The count of 207 individual birds is the highest tally for a decade