I was just outside (attending to clothes on my Hill’s hoist). A grey bird flew past and to perch in dense bushes in my yard. I only saw the top of it and it took a minute or more to find it in the dense shrubbery. I wasn’t aware what it
was initially, as it seemed to be wriggling about quite vigorously in the tree. I actually thought it was a bowerbird trying to pull fruits of the branch. I went inside to get binoculars and fortunately it stayed there as I did. On locating, it was easy to
pick as a juvenile Grey Butcherbird and it had a mouse. At that stage just the front of the mouse but the head was obvious. It spent something like 20 minutes wedging the mouse into tree forks and shaking it and pulling it apart to eat. Each few minutes moving
around to find a different fork in the branches and at one stage flying to another tree and continuing. Eventually the mouse appeared to have been all eaten and it then spent the next 5 minutes vigorously wiping its beak on the branches, then sitting quite
still. Even though mostly in thick foliage it was at the minimum focus distance of my binoculars. Nothing particularly unusual about all of this but I haven’t seen this (at least in that much detail) before.
Note that, unlike shrikes, butcherbirds never impale prey on thorns. (Graham Pizzey taught me that.) It is an aspect that creates some confusion because the Latin name of the shrikes is Lanius, that means butcher, given due their behaviour
of impaling prey on thorns and so in some countries, shrikes are also sometimes called butcherbirds. Shrikes are somewhat like small butcherbirds.
Philip
