Gurgaon: Haryana saw a rare visitor of the avian kind on Monday — a red-backed shrike, a small migratory bird from central Russia, was spotted in Jhajjar, making it the first documented sighting of the species in the state.Birdwatcher Rakesh Ahlawat spotted it sitting on a shrub close to a railway line in Dighal during his routine birding trip. He said its appearance immediately stood out from the shrikes he usually encounters in the area.“Mostly, the shrikes we see here have a long tail and a bay or brown back. This one was quite different,” he said. It has brownish upperparts and a pale underside, with fine dark markings giving a scaled or scalloped appearance around the body. The photograph also shows the characteristic long tail and compact, hooked bill of a shrike.Red-backed shrikes are small predatory passerines that typically are seen in open landscapes with thorny vegetation, which they use to hold or impale prey.The species hunts from elevated perches, including bushes and wires. Its prey can include large insects, small birds and rodents. It can also be inconspicuous despite its predatory behaviour, spending periods quietly perched on a shrub and becoming easy to overlook.Ahlawat said the species flies in from Siberia and surrounding areas during the autumn months of Sept and Oct and is mainly seen in the Kachchh region of Gujarat.In Jhajjar, the bird’s behaviour also helped draw his attention. Ahlawat said he noticed that it repeatedly spread its tail and moved it up and down, something he said he had not observed in other shrikes.The bird was not in a group and appeared to be an immature individual, he said, adding that it may have strayed from its usual route, but a single sighting is not enough to draw a conclusion about it being spotted in the state.The Jhajjar sighting is notable not just because of the species’ rarity, but also because of the habitat in which it was found. The railway-side shrubs provide the kind of open, scrubby setting used by shrikes for hunting and perching, and it may become a new hunting ground for the species.Pankaj Gupta, a senior birder from Delhi Bird Society, said, “It is a major sighting as it is the first documented record of the red-backed shrike in Haryana.”
