"Some days you are the bird...

...other days you are the statue." ~ Ricky Gervais

Forgot to post this earlier, yes that's the Steppe Grey Shrike, yes on my head. That's not photo-shopped by the way, that version features Britney Spears.
Anyway, good news of a sort after analysis of those feathers discovered on site after the Shrike's disappearance found they did not belong to our bird. So the imagination is set free, you can decide for yourself what happened to certainly my Bird of the Year, and many other people's too I'm sure.

How delightful, a pair of Stock Dove outside my window, pecking around beneath the bird table.

Short of disaster we should be moving house soon, The new garden is full of trees; apple, pear, cherry, birch, plus various fruiting shrubs. Ought to be one way to avoid piling on the mileage to get our birdwatching done.

Gone, but never to be forgotten

Last video and final words on the Steppe Grey Shrike, as news came today of only feathers being found in the area the bird had been favouring. I saw a Merlin work the ditches myself while on site, Peregrine and Hen Harrier were around too, among commoner predators, so chances are it was snatched by a raptor. A sad demise for an amazing bird, but what a bird!

(By the way, that certainly wasn't me feeding the bird corned beef!)

Shrike: A Pose

Steppy again, perched on my scope.

No report of the bird today, although midweek birders may have been thin on the ground with the rainy forecast. One theory for why the bird looks so untidy goes that its native habitat are the arid plains of areas like Kazahkstan, leaving this bird naturally unaccustomed to hunting for prey in wet grass. As good a theory as any I suppose, particularly as I read in the Lincolnshire Bird Club forum a list of discoveries found in one of the shrike's pellets:

Remains of at least 11 Pterostichus melanarius (Carabidae – ground beetle family)
Remains of at least 3 Pterostichus niger (Carabidae)
Remains of 1 Ocypus olens (Devil’s coach horse beetle – Staphylinidae/rove beetles)
One aedeagus (male sexual organ) of Catops tristis (Coleoptera – Leiodidae)
Remains of unidentified species of beetle elytra (wing cases)
Miscellaneous heads of non-Coleoptera invertebrates (possibly Diptera)
Heads of two different species of possible Lepidoptera

So beetles basically, which makes sense for a bird smaller than our voracious Great Greys.

Shrike One!

Budby Common

Another successful local rarity tracked down today. Budby Common, an area of sandy heathland immediately north of Sherwood Forest Country Park NNR, has been a traditional site for Great Grey Shrike for years now. This winter has been no different, with at least one being reported since early December. It can go up to a week without apparently being seen, but you can generally be sure there's a shrike out there.

A short walk from Budby village brought us to the heath and almost immediately the GGS showed up, pearching atop a scattering of several small trees. It had obviously read the ID literature because this bird showed textbook behaviour, standing on guard on the highest, most exposed branches and even hovering before swooping down on prey hidden deep in the heather. It was just a completely different story to the aloof Shrike we saw only very at Ogston Reservoir last winter. Perhaps the close proximity of the road at the Derbyshire site influenced the very shy behaviour of that bird.

Back to Budby, and there's a two bird theory among some of the locals, although I'm not so sure myself. We watched our shrike for about an hour and saw it wander quite widely between the two areas it has most commonly been sighted. This movements makes sense as their winter territories can reach 50 ha, and that's pretty damn big.

Here's another murky digi-video-scope for the birdtrail record. Hey it was windy all right? And it's the middle of winter out there!

For a better video try this delightful YouTube offering of a Great Grey Shrike in Israel dispatching a mouse. These birds are hardly the size of a Song Thrush, but ferocious enough to deal with all kinds of prey, birds up to the size of Fieldfare and mammals as large as Stoats! Just a real marauder of bird species, making the black highwayman's mask very fitting plumage.

In Britain the Great Grey Shrike is strictly a winter and passage visitor, most of ours probably coming from Scandinavia or possibly Russia. Perhaps 50 or so are present in the UK each year, with a tendency to turn up practically anywhere there is suitable habitat - including but not exclusive to heathland, peat bogs, the edges of pine woodland, and coastal dunes. Basically wherever they are, it's a top notch species, always special.

Elsewhere on the common were Jay, Green Woodpecker, Meadow Pipit, Kestrel and in adjoining farmland a Skylark warbled and a Buzzard cried as it sailed into woodland. A birder who walked from the Sherwood direction noted a pair of Stonechat.
Otherwise, Budby Common is best in spring/summer, as during a July afternoon you have better than not chances of see Nightjar, Cuckoo, Woodcock, Woodlark and Tree Pipit (blog entry from last year). If you can give it a day, you could scarcely find a more rewarding site in the whole of the East Midlands, and they have ice cream at Sherwood Country Park visitor centre!

Shrike it Lucky!

A good couple of days for us, best bird undoubtedly being the Great Grey Shrike at Ogston Reservoir, Derbys. Whatever the books might say about Shrikes perching atop bushes is wrong! Elusive is hardly the word, skulking barely covers it any better, nonetheless we did get two decent views of the bird in flight. It looked a little smaller than one might expect, but otherwise unmistakable.
Our sympathies went out to an older couple of local bird club members, they arrived two minutes after the Shrike gave the only half hour showing of the day, and promptly thereafter searched hard, so hard they tired and retreated to their car for a nap. As you might imagine, this was when the bird was again visible. There's a moral in that somewhere.
Seemed like plenty of other birders attracted by reports of the Shrike missed out too as for much of the day it remained deeply in a thicket. It is perhaps very telling that for a regional mega that's been around for a couple of weeks now the only photograph of it is very distant indeed. If that doesn't impress, I'm happily quoting the local bird news websites that say it's the first Shrike on site since 1978, so perhaps you'll forgive my boasting?

Also got my first Little Ringed Plover of the year, to go with the Wheatear I found at the old pit yesterday. Good time to be out and about anywhere.