Masked shrike
The masked shrike is a bird in the shrike family, Laniidae. It breeds in southeastern Europe and at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. The species’ calls are short and grating, but the song has melodic warbler-like components. Populations are decreasing in parts of the European range, but not rapidly enough to raise serious conservation concerns.
About Masked shrike in brief
The masked shrike is a bird in the shrike family, Laniidae. It breeds in southeastern Europe and at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, with a separate population in eastern Iraq and western Iran. It is migratory, wintering mainly in northeast Africa. The male has mainly black upperparts, with white on its crown, forehead and supercilium and large white patches on the shoulders and wings. The female is a duller version of the male, with brownish black upper parts and a grey or buff tone to the shoulders. The juvenile has grey-brown upperparts with a paler forehead and barring from the head to rump, barred off-white underparts and brown wings from the white primary patches. The species’ calls are short and grating, but the song has melodic warbler-like components. Populations are decreasing in parts of the European range, but not rapidly enough to raise serious conservation concerns, and the species is therefore classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as being of least concern. It eats mainly large insects, occasionally small vertebrates; it sometimes impales its prey on thorns or barbed wire. The nest is a neat cup built in a tree by both adults. The clutch is normally 4–6 eggs, which are incubated by the female for 14–16 days until hatching.
The chicks are fed by both parents until they fledge 18–20 days later, and remain dependent on the adults for about 3–4 weeks after leaving the nest. The bird was independently described by Dutch zoologist Coenraad Temminck in 1824 as Lanius personatus, from the Latin personatus “masked”, referring, as does the English name, to the bird’s appearance. The shrikes are a family of slender, long-tailed passerines with rounded wings and a hooked tip to the bill. Most occur in open habitats. The affiliations of the masked shrikes with other members of the genus are uncertain; the “brown” shrikes and tropical species like the Somali fiscal have both been suggested as possible relatives. The maskedShrike is the smallest of its genus, a slender bird which usually weighs 20–23 g, measuring 17–18.5 cm long with a 24–26. 5 cm wingspan. It has a long tail and relatively small bill, on each side of which is a tomial tooth; the upper mandible bears a triangular ridge which fits a corresponding notch in the lower mandible. This adaptation is otherwise only found in falcons in falconry. There are no subspecies for the maskedshrike.
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This page is based on the article Masked shrike published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
