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Lesser Gray Shrike | Lanius minor
Kleine klapekster | Alcaudón chico
The Lesser Grey Shrike is the summer bird among the grey shrikes: it breeds on the warm plains of south-eastern Europe and leaves in August for southern Africa. It sits strikingly upright on a wire or an isolated tree in farmland, hunts mainly large beetles and grasshoppers, and impales its catch on thorns and barbed wire. On the Iberian Peninsula the wild breeding population has dwindled to a handful of pairs in the Plana de Lleida; in the British Isles and around the southern North Sea it is a rare vagrant, usually in late spring.
Voice
The song is a hurried, slightly scratchy warble of short high phrases laced with imitations of other birds, delivered from a wire or the top of a poplar and sometimes in a fluttering song flight. In alarm a hard, chacking tchek-tchek and a harsher kwek. In the African winter quarters it is all but silent.
Recording: András Schmidt — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
Smaller and more compact than Great Grey Shrike, with a shorter tail and much longer wing points that reach well down over the base of the tail. The upperparts are a clean blue-grey, the underparts white with a soft rose flush across breast and belly, strongest on the male in the breeding season. The decisive character is on the head: the black mask runs not only through the eye but right across the forehead, so that a black band above the bill joins the two eye masks and no white brow is left. The bill is short, thick and bluntly hooked. The wing is black with a white primary patch; the tail is black with white outer feathers. Females show less black on the forehead and are duller; juveniles lack the black forehead altogether, have a brownish mask and finely scaled upperparts. The bird often perches very upright, head high and tail still, and hunts with short, quick drops to the ground.
Confusion species
Great Grey Shrike is the yardstick: larger, longer-tailed, shorter-winged, and its black mask stops at the base of the bill with a thin white line above it — in Lesser Grey the black carries straight on across the forehead. Season separates them too: Great Grey is a winter bird in north-west Europe and Lesser Grey a summer one, so the window in which both can occur is narrow. Iberian Grey Shrike also has a broad mask, but with a broad white brow above it, a darker grey back and a stronger pink wash; it belongs to the south-west and does not migrate. Northern Shrike is larger and paler again, with a long bill and a strong hook. Young birds call for care: they lack the black forehead and can then look much like a young Great Grey — note instead the far longer wing point, the shorter tail and the shorter, blunter bill.
Habitat
Warm, open farmed country with plenty of tall isolated trees: arable and lucerne fields with roadside rows of poplar, willow or mulberry, wood pasture and extensively grazed grassland with scattered trees, and hedges and shelter belts along field edges. It needs the combination of high, free lookouts, short or bare ground on which large insects are visible, and thorns or barbed wire on which to store the catch. Wet, cold or heavily wooded country it avoids.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Breeds from north-eastern Iberia and the Apennine peninsula east through the Balkans and the Carpathian Basin to the southern steppes of eastern Europe, Anatolia and Central Asia, with its centre of gravity in the steppe belt; the western edge is retreating — in Iberia a few pairs remain near Lleida, against some ninety in the Ebro valley in the late 1980s, sustained by captive breeding at Vallcalent and annual releases. It winters in southern Africa, migrating by way of the eastern Mediterranean. In north-west Europe a vagrant, mostly in May and June on the islands and along the North Sea coast — overshooting spring birds — and noticeably fewer since the turn of the century.
- Breeding (summer)
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In north-west Europe it is a matter of waiting for news: a grey shrike in May or June on an offshore island is suspicious and deserves a good look at the forehead. The last territories on the Plana de Lleida are closely monitored and should not be visited. To see the species with certainty, go to the puszta of the Carpathian Basin, the Vojvodina or the Dobrudja between mid-May and early July. Drive the field tracks there and scan the wires and isolated trees along lucerne and sunflower fields; in the middle of a warm day, when the beetles are flying, the bird sits highest and straightest.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened (IUCN: Least Concern), thanks to large numbers in eastern Europe and Asia, but in Europe the species has largely fallen away along the western edge of its range: it has gone as a breeder from the west of central Europe, the Alpine region and most of western Europe, and little is left on the Apennine peninsula or in Iberia. The causes are those that press on Red-Backed Shrike as well — the removal of tree lines and hedges, the shift to large-scale arable farming, pesticides and the decline of large insects — compounded by drought in the African winter quarters.
Scientific name
Lanius minor | Gmelin, 1788
Gmelin described the species in 1788 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. 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. minor is Latin for 'smaller', this bird being smaller than the great grey shrike. The specimen the first description was based on came from Italy.