Japan Autumn Leaves Photo Tour Scouting - Birding Encounter with The Bull-Headed Shrike, the Butcher

While scouting for my 2022 and 2023 Japan autumn leaves photo tours, I awoke one morning about 05:30 to hear a Bull-Headed Shrike (Lanius bucephalus) perched in a tree surveying my campsite. Bull-headed shrikes are songbirds, though their song consists of a scratchy warble and a rather harsh “chack” call. I knew I had heard a shrike, and as soon as I put my eye to the viewfinder of the Nikon Z7 MarkII with my Nikon 800mm f5.6 fixed Nikon lens, I automatically knew I was spotting and photographing the (Lanius bucephalus) and not the common tree sparrow (Passer montanus). Many bird watchers and even the experienced birder can be fooled into believing they are spotting the common tree sparrow at a distance because of their similarities. Still, once you see the shrikes clearly through your viewfinder or binoculars, you will quickly identify this species with their hooked beaks, brilliant colors, black and white wing feathers, rust-colored flanks, and what I like to call a hunting stripe running across their eyes. These birds perch in high locations, as the occasion when the shrike visited my campsite, but it also frequents telephone poles, and while hunting among Japanese Shinto and Buddhist temples and shrines, it has been known to perch itself in the stone lanterns that are synonymous with the Japanese spiritual locations while it waits for prey. My birding photography enthusiast colleagues will be happy to know that the Bull-Headed Shrike domain spans from Japan’s most northern island, Hokkaido, all the way down to Kyushu, in common areas such as gardens or in prefectures like Niigata with ample farmland for the shrikes to hunt in. Like the Steller’s Sea Eagles that migrate from the Kamchatka Peninsula to Hokkaido for my Hokkaido birding photo tour expedition, the Bull-Headed Shrikes migrate south from Hokkaido to Japan’s main island for the more hospitable winter temperatures there. They hunt like raptors and feast mostly on prey close to the same size as them, such as small birds, mammals, insects, and this is where their scientific classification gives some insight into their hunting proclivities. The ‘Lanius’ of Lanius bucephalus is translated as ‘butcher,’ and this is apt for these birds of prey because they quickly grasp their prey in their hooked beaks and impale it onto thorns or protruding branches of rose bushes, cactuses and have even been known to use barbed wire until they need to feed on them. Because of their varied and opportunistic feeding habits, they have been classified as an excellent indicator species, being used by scientists to monitor the effects of climate change via the Bull-Headed Shrikes population.