A Great Grey Shrike.

Original Watercolour on board. Initialled lower right. In a glazed gilt frame. 110 x 130mm.

The great grey shrike (Lanius excubitor) is a large and predatory songbird species in the shrike family (Laniidae)

The species was first scientifically described by Carl Linnaeus in his 1758 edition of Systema Naturae under the current binomial name. His description is L[anius] cauda cuneiformi lateribus alba, dorso cano, alis nigris macula alba – “a shrike with a wedge-shaped, white-bordered tail, back grey, wings black with white spot”. At that time, none of the other grey shrikes – including the lesser grey shrike (L. minor), for which the description of the tail pattern is incorrect and which some authors already recognized as distinct – were considered separate species by Linnaeus, but that was to change.

A falconer’s name for the great grey shrike was mattages(s)(e), which is related to mat’agasse from the western Alps. These terms may mean “magpie killer”, due to their use for luring carnivorous birds to hunters – but perhaps more likely “killer magpie”, considering that the bird was believed to be a peculiar sort of magpie by Johann Leonhard Frisch and others, and that another vernacular English name was “murdering pie”. Shrike, meanwhile, is of Germanic origin also and dates back at least to Middle or Early Modern English schricum. This is related to such words as Norwegian and Swedish skrika (“shriek, skrike”), German Schrei (“scream”) or Icelandic shrikja (“shrieker”). But it seems to have become the dominant term only in rather recent times, for as late as the 18th century, the species was still widely known as “greater butcher-bird” in English, just like it was known as the boucher (“butcher”) in the French Jura. In Norway a vernacular name for the bird is varsler. A whimsical name – presumably from Scotland or nearby England – was “white whisky John” in reference to its wavy and somewhat unelegant flight, during which its large areas of light plumage are conspicuous.

Provenance: Scott Kelly – Edinburgh & Cairngorms. Friend of Thorburn & Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott.