Shrikes remind of summers past

Woodchat Shrike (John Riley)

RSPB South Stack hosted two different types of shrike at the weekend, one attracting plenty of attention from visitors. A female Woodchat Shrike spent several days hunting below the Visitor Centre. The name ‘butcher bird’ is enshrined in their scientific family name Lanius (from the Latin laniare, ‘to tear to pieces’), owed to their habit of impaling prey on a sharp thorn. She was seen spiking lizards and bumblebees on the Western Gorse that is a feature of the Anglesey coastal heath. Remarkably, another species of shrike – a male Red-backed – was found at the southern end of the reserve, on Penrhosfeilw Common, on Saturday, but soon vanished.

Both shrikes are scarce visitors to Wales, but the Woodchat is rarer. This was the first on Ynys Gybi/Holy Island since one at Porth Dafarch in 1928, and the odds of a repeat are getting smaller. The population is classed as Near Threatened and the northern edge of its breeding range has contracted south in recent decades, as changes in farming out-compete the changing climate.

Red-backed Shrikes have gone the same way. They used to breed widely across Wales but declined over a couple of centuries as farming changed the landscape; it was very common on ffridd, a habitat of which we have lost so much. In the 19th century, many were trapped by the gruesome practice of ‘liming’ – caught on twigs coated in a sticky substance from which they couldn’t release themselves – on Ynys Gybi headlands. The last Red-backed Shrikes to nest on Anglesey were near Newborough in 1917 and on the mainland in the Aber Valley in 1952, but males occasionally turn up and hold territory for a few days. One did exactly that last month in Mynydd Hiraethog.
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Other scarce visitors to the region include a colourful adult Rosy Starling in a north Anglesey garden, Quails on Mynydd Bodafon and Ruabon Moor, a couple of Little Stints on the Alaw estuary and a Spoonbill at RSPB Cors Ddyga.