Great Grey Shrikes at Fakenham and Felbrigg
Marcus Nash
A Great Grey Shrike had been reported to the west of Fakenham briefly on 15th December 2011 and again on 23rd, but on the afternoon of Christmas Eve what was presumably the same bird seemed to have finally settled on the northeastern outskirts of the town. I still had a parcel to collect from there and my son, who had only started birding that year, had never seen a Great Grey Shrike, so I decided we would try to see it on the way. It was already 3.30pm and already getting dark as we arrived. Wandering down the remains of the old Cromer Road, we were fortunate that the bird flew across the path in front of us and landed in the top of a small tree. As I set the scope up I thought that it looked strangely pale and showed a lot of white in the wing. Once my son had seen it, I had another quick look and confirmed it did indeed look odd, before the bird flew away from us and we could not find it again. Certain features immediately reminded me of the homeyeri race of Great Grey Shrike, a subspecies I had previously had reason to look into (more of which below!).
I returned on Boxing Day and found the bird in much the same place as before. It seemed to have established a routine - it would fly in to the scrub and trees along the side of the old road to hunt and back out into a mature hedgerow across the field when disturbed by people walking along the path. On several occasions it was seen returning to the same hedge with a vole and, based on the limited time it spent out of view, it was obviously caching food somewhere there. My initial impressions were confirmed - again it looked subtly unlike any other first-winter Great Grey Shrike I had seen, with quite pallid grey upperparts, a large amount of white on the scapulars, pale lores and a diffuse but well-marked pale supercilium. This time though, the wings did not appear to have as much white as I had previously thought, in particular there did not seem to be a lot of white at the base of the secondaries, a key feature of homeyeri. The white line formed by the tips of the greater coverts appeared to be more extensive than shown by a normal first-winter Great Grey Shrike and I spent a long time trying to work out whether there was any white in the secondary bases poking out from below. However, although I couldn’t be sure I eventually persuaded myself there probably wasn’t. I spent as long watching it as I could, and took some digiscoped pictures, but couldn’t come to any firm conclusion as to its identity. I bumped into another couple of birders as I left, told them where it was and mentioned my thoughts about the bird.
Looking at my photos, it clearly wasn’t a Steppe Grey Shrike (pallidirostris) and had to be one of the forms of Great Grey. In many respects it was very close to homeyeri, but for the apparent absence of white in the secondaries. I had previously conversed with Andy Stoddart on homeyeri so, later on 27th, I sent him an email. Coincidentally, he had already been sent a photo by one of the people I had spoken to on Boxing Day and had been to see it earlier that day. He too had thought it looked unusual but had also been unable to rationalise the extent of white in the wing. The following day, Mark Golley independently went to see the bird and reached a similar conclusion. Martin Garner had previously written about another homeyeri candidate in Sheffield in late 2010 and, contacted by Mark, had made positive noises about the initial appearance of the Fakenham bird.
Knowing that we needed better views of the spread wing, I returned early on 29th. The bird was in exactly the same place as it had been previously and eventually it perched up obligingly on the end of the hedge and started to preen. As it half opened its wing, extensive white bases to the secondaries appeared from beneath the greater coverts. Andy arrived shortly after and I told him the news - we agreed, the presence of white in the secondaries, together with the bird’s overall appearance, must surely point towards homeyeri influence. We watched it over the next couple of hours and several times it flew in to the hedge directly in front of us, spreading its wings and tail as it came in to land. While preening, I had been slightly concerned that its white secondary bases might be shorter than the primary bases, producing a ‘step’ in the wing bar which homeyeri should ideally not show, but in flight the wing bar looked even across the wing. In addition, the bird showed very extensive white sides to the spread tail, another pro-homeyeri feature. It would take very good photos to show the exact amount of white in wing and tail and completely rule out the possibility of an intergrade but we felt we had seen enough to put the news out.
The possibility of it being a homeyeri stimulated a large amount of interest in the bird and we were rapidly provided with a much larger number of photos. Eventually, these included some photos of the fully spread wing and tail and, unfortunately, these did show a step in the extent of the wing bar between primaries and secondaries. In addition, current thinking suggests homeyeri should ideally show two all-white (or very nearly so) outer tail feathers and, although mostly white here, the Fakenham bird appeared to show a little too much black in the inner web of t5. Based on this and according to current thinking, the Fakenham bird could not be a pure homeyeri. However, most who saw the bird came away sharing our impression that it looked interesting, and very unlike other Great Grey Shrikes they have seen.
Description
Upperparts - Generally a rather pale grey above, seeming paler than a typical Great Grey Shrike. Combined with extensive white scapulars, this gave the bird overall a pallid appearance. The white in the scapulars was particularly broad towards the rear and narrowing slightly towards the front. The uppertail coverts appeared paler than the mantle, greyish white, though somewhat darker where the longest uppertail coverts overlaid the black of the tail feathers, so producing a slightly paler band across the back below the rump. Nominate Great Grey Shrike is typically concolourous from mantle to uppertail coverts.
Head - Dark blackish mask well marked behind the eye, perhaps not as striking as a typical Great Grey Shrike. Lores contrastingly pale, greyish, rather than the more typical black continuation of the face mask to the bill base in first-winter of the nominate form (though there is some variation). A well-marked pale off-white line above the face mask, particularly above and in front of the eye, continued over the top of the bill to give a pale forehead. Crown grey, concolourous with mantle towards the rear but darker at the front and seemed washed with a slightly dirty brown above where the supercilia met over the bill base.
Underparts - Mostly appeared plain off-white. However, in particularly good views faint vermiculations were visible on the breast.
Wings - Most striking feature was the amount of white visible in the closed wing. The white patch at the base of the primaries was particularly large, and more extensive than in typical excubitor Great Grey Shrike. In addition, a diagonal white line across the wing was formed by pale tips to the greater coverts (confirming the bird as a first-winter) as well as white bases to the secondaries protruding from beneath, the latter causing the line to bulge out above the primary coverts. The amount of white in the secondary bases visible on the closed wing varied somewhat as the bird changed the way it held its wings. In flight, the combination of white primary and secondary bases produced a striking white wing bar. However, whereas the white on the inner primaries extended for around half the exposed feather, that on the outer secondaries was only around one third of the visible feather, producing a noticeable narrowing of the wing bar between the two feather tracts.
Tail - The closed tail looked generally black, but when spread showed extensive white sides. Photographs appear to show an all-white outer tail feather (t6), with perhaps a small amount of dark on the shaft towards the base. The second outermost (t5) has a white outer web but with extensive dark on the inner web accounting for up to half the exposed length of the feather.
Bare parts - The bill appeared dark grey distally, with an extensive pale horn base to the lower mandible. Legs and feet looking black.
I returned on Boxing Day and found the bird in much the same place as before. It seemed to have established a routine - it would fly in to the scrub and trees along the side of the old road to hunt and back out into a mature hedgerow across the field when disturbed by people walking along the path. On several occasions it was seen returning to the same hedge with a vole and, based on the limited time it spent out of view, it was obviously caching food somewhere there. My initial impressions were confirmed - again it looked subtly unlike any other first-winter Great Grey Shrike I had seen, with quite pallid grey upperparts, a large amount of white on the scapulars, pale lores and a diffuse but well-marked pale supercilium. This time though, the wings did not appear to have as much white as I had previously thought, in particular there did not seem to be a lot of white at the base of the secondaries, a key feature of homeyeri. The white line formed by the tips of the greater coverts appeared to be more extensive than shown by a normal first-winter Great Grey Shrike and I spent a long time trying to work out whether there was any white in the secondary bases poking out from below. However, although I couldn’t be sure I eventually persuaded myself there probably wasn’t. I spent as long watching it as I could, and took some digiscoped pictures, but couldn’t come to any firm conclusion as to its identity. I bumped into another couple of birders as I left, told them where it was and mentioned my thoughts about the bird.
Looking at my photos, it clearly wasn’t a Steppe Grey Shrike (pallidirostris) and had to be one of the forms of Great Grey. In many respects it was very close to homeyeri, but for the apparent absence of white in the secondaries. I had previously conversed with Andy Stoddart on homeyeri so, later on 27th, I sent him an email. Coincidentally, he had already been sent a photo by one of the people I had spoken to on Boxing Day and had been to see it earlier that day. He too had thought it looked unusual but had also been unable to rationalise the extent of white in the wing. The following day, Mark Golley independently went to see the bird and reached a similar conclusion. Martin Garner had previously written about another homeyeri candidate in Sheffield in late 2010 and, contacted by Mark, had made positive noises about the initial appearance of the Fakenham bird.
Knowing that we needed better views of the spread wing, I returned early on 29th. The bird was in exactly the same place as it had been previously and eventually it perched up obligingly on the end of the hedge and started to preen. As it half opened its wing, extensive white bases to the secondaries appeared from beneath the greater coverts. Andy arrived shortly after and I told him the news - we agreed, the presence of white in the secondaries, together with the bird’s overall appearance, must surely point towards homeyeri influence. We watched it over the next couple of hours and several times it flew in to the hedge directly in front of us, spreading its wings and tail as it came in to land. While preening, I had been slightly concerned that its white secondary bases might be shorter than the primary bases, producing a ‘step’ in the wing bar which homeyeri should ideally not show, but in flight the wing bar looked even across the wing. In addition, the bird showed very extensive white sides to the spread tail, another pro-homeyeri feature. It would take very good photos to show the exact amount of white in wing and tail and completely rule out the possibility of an intergrade but we felt we had seen enough to put the news out.
The possibility of it being a homeyeri stimulated a large amount of interest in the bird and we were rapidly provided with a much larger number of photos. Eventually, these included some photos of the fully spread wing and tail and, unfortunately, these did show a step in the extent of the wing bar between primaries and secondaries. In addition, current thinking suggests homeyeri should ideally show two all-white (or very nearly so) outer tail feathers and, although mostly white here, the Fakenham bird appeared to show a little too much black in the inner web of t5. Based on this and according to current thinking, the Fakenham bird could not be a pure homeyeri. However, most who saw the bird came away sharing our impression that it looked interesting, and very unlike other Great Grey Shrikes they have seen.
Description
Upperparts - Generally a rather pale grey above, seeming paler than a typical Great Grey Shrike. Combined with extensive white scapulars, this gave the bird overall a pallid appearance. The white in the scapulars was particularly broad towards the rear and narrowing slightly towards the front. The uppertail coverts appeared paler than the mantle, greyish white, though somewhat darker where the longest uppertail coverts overlaid the black of the tail feathers, so producing a slightly paler band across the back below the rump. Nominate Great Grey Shrike is typically concolourous from mantle to uppertail coverts.
Head - Dark blackish mask well marked behind the eye, perhaps not as striking as a typical Great Grey Shrike. Lores contrastingly pale, greyish, rather than the more typical black continuation of the face mask to the bill base in first-winter of the nominate form (though there is some variation). A well-marked pale off-white line above the face mask, particularly above and in front of the eye, continued over the top of the bill to give a pale forehead. Crown grey, concolourous with mantle towards the rear but darker at the front and seemed washed with a slightly dirty brown above where the supercilia met over the bill base.
Underparts - Mostly appeared plain off-white. However, in particularly good views faint vermiculations were visible on the breast.
Wings - Most striking feature was the amount of white visible in the closed wing. The white patch at the base of the primaries was particularly large, and more extensive than in typical excubitor Great Grey Shrike. In addition, a diagonal white line across the wing was formed by pale tips to the greater coverts (confirming the bird as a first-winter) as well as white bases to the secondaries protruding from beneath, the latter causing the line to bulge out above the primary coverts. The amount of white in the secondary bases visible on the closed wing varied somewhat as the bird changed the way it held its wings. In flight, the combination of white primary and secondary bases produced a striking white wing bar. However, whereas the white on the inner primaries extended for around half the exposed feather, that on the outer secondaries was only around one third of the visible feather, producing a noticeable narrowing of the wing bar between the two feather tracts.
Tail - The closed tail looked generally black, but when spread showed extensive white sides. Photographs appear to show an all-white outer tail feather (t6), with perhaps a small amount of dark on the shaft towards the base. The second outermost (t5) has a white outer web but with extensive dark on the inner web accounting for up to half the exposed length of the feather.
Bare parts - The bill appeared dark grey distally, with an extensive pale horn base to the lower mandible. Legs and feet looking black.
Great Grey Shrike Taxonomy
The taxonomy of the Great Grey Shrike complex is particularly complicated. Even leaving aside the southern, Asian and North American forms, there are several forms within the ‘northern’ excubitor group which appear to intergrade extensively. Most authorities currently recognise three subspecies. The familiar nominate excubitor breeds from central and northern Europe eastwards through northern Russia. To the south it is replaced by homeyeri, which reaches at least from western Ukraine across western Siberia. Further east from homeyeri, an even paler form is currently classified as leucopterus.
However, even within the nominate subspecies, the appearance of birds from different parts of the range varies greatly and in the past excubitor was itself treated as two different subspecies. Northern birds, from Scandinavia and northern Russia, typically show a single white patch in the wing formed by the pale bases to the primaries – these were known as ‘melanopterus’. Birds breeding in central western Europe, particularly France and Germany, generally show much more extensive areas of white, particularly in wing and tail, and typically have the white wing bar spreading across the bases of both the primaries and secondaries – these were called ‘galliae’. As the population of the latter has declined sharply over the last century, these names have fallen out of fashion and it has possibly been somewhat forgotten that these two different forms still exist.
With the more extensive white in its plumage, particularly the wingbar across both primaries and secondaries, ‘galliae’ could closely resemble homeyeri. Indeed, measurements suggest at the very least that they can almost completely overlap homeyeri in the amount of white in the wing, and they may also show white in the tail of similar extent. Taxonomically, ‘galliae’ may actually represent the western end of a cline of ‘wing-barred’ Great Grey Shrikes, from leucopterus in the east through homeyeri. Moving west along this cline, birds appear to get progressively darker so homeyeri, as an intermediate between ‘galliae’ and the exceptionally pale leucopterus, should perhaps at least be paler than birds from western Europe. Beyond that, it seems there is actually much uncertainty over how they can actually be distinguished in a vagrant context.
It is interesting to note that the amount of white in the wings of ‘galliae’ differs between the sexes and also varies with age. Notably, while males of this form show a more uniform wing bar, females show a step where the longer pale bases of the primaries meet the shorter pale bases of the secondaries. While current thinking suggests that homeyeri cannot show this step, it is not entirely clear what is the full range of variation in this subspecies. Birds of intermediate appearance are often considered to be intergrades, but the extent of age and sex related differences in homeyeri is not clearly detailed, in western literature at least.
Conclusion
Birds with white in the secondaries which otherwise resemble typical nominate excubitor do seem to turn up in this country, and elsewhere in Western Europe, with some regularity. However, unlike the Fakenham shrike, they do not typically show the same overall pallor, or other features such as extensive white in the scapulars, pale lores and such a well marked supercilium. Consequently, it is tempting to assume that these other birds are most likely to be western European ‘galliae’.
So where does this leave the Fakenham shrike? Based on current criteria, and considering the extent of white in wings and tail, the Fakenham shrike cannot be considered to be homeyeri. It is possible that it is an intergrade between homeyeri and excubitor or even an extreme pale example of ‘galliae’. At this stage, we honestly don’t know. I have certainly learnt a lot about Great Grey Shrikes in researching this subject and, in particular, I have realised how much we still have to learn. Perhaps, as we find out more about the range of variation in ‘galliae’ and homeyeri, we might have a better idea what to call it.
The Felbrigg Shrike
Even if the Fakenham shrike did turn out to be homeyeri or an intergrade, it is possible it is not the first for Norfolk! In the summer of 2010, Nigel Rogers was visiting Felbrigg Hall and, while there, he happened to look through their collection of bird specimens. In among a case of Great Grey Shrikes, he noticed a bird which looked much paler, with a particularly striking amount of white in the tail. He mentioned it to a few people at the time but despite some investigation it didn’t progress much further. It was clearly not a Steppe Grey Shrike and on first glance the amount of white in wings and tail did not look quite extensive enough for homeyeri. In addition, the specimen was poorly mounted, a bit worn and possibly faded. Not to be put off, Nigel went back in Sept 2011 and took some photographs of the bird, which he then emailed round. Andy Stoddart replied and also circulated some photos that he had taken.
One of the potential stumbling blocks to the bird being homeyeri was that the pattern of the second outermost tail feather on the right side, nearest the front of the case, appeared to be wrong for that form, showing an extensive amount of black spanning both webs. However, looking in detail at Andy’s photos and comparing with the limited detail visible on the other side of the tail it became clear that the specimen was actually missing the right hand outer tail feather. This meant that the remaining outermost feather was actually t5 and this feather was predominantly white with just a very small amount of black on the edge of the inner web towards the base. Looking at the underneath of the left side of the tail, t6 appeared to be all white. Together with extensive white bases to the other tail feathers, this implied that the bird would have shown a classic homeyeri tail pattern.
One of the other issues with the specimen was the amount of white in the wing, which did not look extensive enough for homeyeri on the right side, facing the front of the case. However, on closer examination it became apparent that one of the secondaries had dropped, obscuring the true appearance of the wing. Reassuringly, that feather did appear to show an extensive white base covering at least one third of the total length. Just visible underneath that displaced feather, the bird appeared to show quite an extensive pale patch at the base of the primaries. In addition, Andy had managed to get a photo looking down the back of the case which showed a little of the hidden left side of the bird. This appeared to show an extensive double white patch on the closed wing, across both the primaries and secondaries, again potentially more consistent with homeyeri.
Various other features also look to be supportive of homeyeri. While the specimen’s apparently very pale grey upperparts could be due to fading, this bird is notably paler than the other Great Grey Shrikes in the same case. It also appears to show extensive white in the scapulars, a very well marked white supercilium and quite pale lores. However, to really clinch the identification, we would need to see the detail of the spread wing and make sure it did not show a step in the wingbar, like the Fakenham bird. There is clearly no way we will be allowed to do that with such an old specimen. Given also the questions over the status of these pale birds turning up in Western Europe, this bird will also have to go unidentified, for now at least. Fortunately, it is not going anywhere!
