Shifting baselines and a Red Backed Shrike

The first time I can remember seeing a Red Backed Shrike was when I was working in the Scottish Highlands during the summer of 1990, a singing male had been reported somewhere near Loch Ruthven and I was given a lift to see the bird on the simple condition that I kept the news secret.

Male Red Backed Shrike, Roydon Common

By 1990 the baseline for Red Backed Shrike in the UK was of a very rare breeding bird, nowhere regular with pairs breeding occasionally around the country one year and not returning the next, and whose presence had to be kept secret from egg collectors and anyone else who might disturb them.

Yet not so very many years before I started birding in the 80s, they would have been regarded as a widespread and familiar bird of the countryside, they even had a well-known colloquial name, Butcher Bird, on account of their habit of impaling prey on thorn bushes. That was the baseline an early 20^th century birder would have been familiar with.

These days I regard any day that I see a Shrike as a good one, an occurrence that with luck I might experience two or three times a year. That’s the early 21^st century Red Backed Shrike baseline.

So, when a summer plumaged male turned up at Roydon Common a few miles from my house recently I didn’t take long to decide that I wanted to go and see it.

I arrived at the Common after work in lovely soft, golden summer evening light, and quickly found a group of half a dozen birders standing around where the bird had last been seen.

After an uncertain and mildly stressful few minutes the bird was relocated, and we were soon able to enjoy the Shrikes company as it hunted for spiders in the heather and scrub. As folk having seen the bird started to chat the conversation became a living history of the species fortunes and changing perceptions of its status over the last half century.

One birder happy with the views he’d had fell into conversation with me, he remembered when he first started birding “...they still nested around here” and gestured vaguely in the direction of the Brecks where the last regular breeding pair in England hung on until the late 80’s. For him they had once been a regular but special part of his youthful summers. Something that I guess made the evening twitch to see this lone passing bird all the more poignant an experience.

Why did they disappear? Perhaps an answer can be found in The Netherlands from where my Dutch birding mate Arnold messaged me to say that “Red Backed Shrike was almost gone from the Netherlands years ago, but they are making an impressive comeback. They are back on the coast where I live too. So good hopes for the UK I guess”! But why?

The evidence would seem to suggest that where localised recovery in Shrike numbers has happened in The Netherlands it is because the conditions have been created to increase the amount of large insect prey, they depend upon.

So perhaps as we strive to create bigger areas of more resilient habitat in the UK we too will one day have created the conditions to encourage passing Red Backed Shrikes to stop and redraw their baseline in the English countryside as a regular breeding summer visitor.

But until that happens, I will just have to content myself with the occasional treat watching migrating Shrikes around my home on the Norfolk coast.