Shrike Time - 25th August 2026

And still the shrike remains!

This evening the shrike was particulary confiding, perching in his usual hawthorn by the bridleway and coming down to within feet of us to seize various insect prey he spotted in the withered grass.

I am convinced it undoubtedly had something to do with the fact there were only four or five of us present this evening and we all stood back from the hedgerow, unlike the larger numbers that were here yesterday.

Anyway I stood quietly watching the shrike rather than taking too many more images which would only serve as duplicates of those I had taken on all my previous visits.  I was waiting for the shrike to descend to the ground in order to try and get some images of him on the ground.It is not easy as you have to remain constantly alert due to having no idea when the shrike will spot a potential victim and decide to fly down and when it does he is on the ground for seconds only before flying back to his perch.

The most intereting interesting thing this evening was when he caught what I think was a large moth possibly a Silver Y and flew back to an elder to try and impale it on one of the many dead twigs or stems sticking up like bones in the elder but failed due to the twigs not being sharp or thin enough.He made several abortive attempts to afix the moth to one of these but finally gave up and flew to his favourite hawthorn with its many thorns and had no trouble securing the moth to one of these.

I took a sequence of images from the moment the shrike flew towards the moth from its perch to when it landed on the ground to capture the moth and then subsequently attempted unsuccessfully to impale it on an elder stem 

Mostly its diet this evening consisted of grasshoppers and the occasional beetle and he rarely had to move more than fifty metres in either direction from his favourite hawthorn occasionally visiting a bramble or elder bush.

Eventually the light began to fade and photography was futile so I got chatting to two fellow birders and we became engrossed in swapping stories of our various experiences and the shrike became almost forgotten, perched in another hawthorn near to four people sat on the ground who also seemed to have decided that photography was a lost cause. 

You can just make out the shrike towards the top left of the image

As the evening drew in, a customary quiet came over the land and the shrike remained quietly watching for one last meal.