The Magpie Bird: Identification, Behaviour, and Where to Find Them

The gray shrike is a bird slightly larger than a skylark that lives among the willow thickets and grasses of small islands set in the middle of a river or in a quarry. Numerous feathered residents make their home there, and you will often spot these birds perched on piles of stones. This bird is the gray shrike.

A nest is most likely somewhere nearby, one in which the young have recently hatched, so the whole family now stays close to home. The adult birds take turns flying off to search for food in the floodplain or in the forest, and each time they return with insects in their beaks.

Gray shrikes often crouch, quivering with their whole body and bobbing their tails. As they do, they give off a metallic call, "tsit." By these scattered sounds you can pick them out on the stones, on the tops of dry willow branches, on the stakes of neighboring wattle fences, and among the low grass beside a passing road.

What does a shrike look like?

A shrike has a light-gray head and back and a whitish belly. From the beak on each side, a black stripe runs through the eye and continues downward. The wings are black with white bars, and the tail is likewise black and long. In flight, a white rump is visible.

Young shrikes are stubby, clumsy little things. Their tails are short and black. The white rump shows clearly both when the fledglings are perched and when they flit about. The upper surface of their body is grayish-brown, and the underside is light gray — but not the whitish tone seen in the adult bird. The fledglings usually sit motionless on the stones, though now and then they crouch and quiver.

The shrike is a useful bird

The shrike is a useful bird because, while raising its young, it destroys large numbers of mosquitoes and other harmful insects. An adult flies to the stones and gives its "tsit" call, at which point either the fledgling flies up to it or it approaches the fledgling. The bird quickly passes the food it has brought from beak to beak and immediately flies off, as if wary of revealing where its offspring are hiding.

Feeding begins in the early morning and continues until late evening. At first the fledglings stay only within the quarry. They flutter from one pile of stones to another and slip into open caves. Before long, however, they begin to fly over greater distances.

Meanwhile, the female teaches her young all sorts of skills: first she drops sharply to the ground, then flies low over it, and finally rises vertically up to the branches. The fledglings move from tree to tree in the same manner. Shrikes are among those birds that, as the saying goes, are easy to recognize by their flight.