I
sent the photo of the shrike with the short tail to Alan Dean for his comments
and he has kindly replied as follows “Interesting thought Jem & I can see
what you mean. It does indeed look like an erythronotus Long-tailed
Shrike in terms of head and body plumage. As you’ll know, moult of the tail
does not involve all feathers at once but involves first the central feathers,
then progressively outwards. Thus, all the tail feathers would not usually be
short at same time. In your photo they all look same length and tail looks
quite well ‘squared off’. Tail moult in spring certainly occurs in nominate schach.
A bird photographed in January in Eastern China by Alan shows outer tail
feathers only part grown, although, by this stage the central feathers are
full-grown, so the tail still looks long. Possible, I suppose that tail had
been lost and hence your shrike was re-growing all feathers at same time. The
other possibility is that it was a hybrid – but there isn’t really much in the
plumage to suggest a second species. As noted before, the outer primaries in
your photo look strangely rufous and the upper tail coverts are perhaps admixed
rufous and black but these could be photo artefacts. In other respects I’d
agree with you that the principal plumage characters point towards Long-tailed
Shrike. Alan also looked through Oriental bird images and found a Long-tailed
Shrike with a tail similar to the one I photographed taken in April in India see this link Moulting Long-tailed Shrike This one was a juvenile
growing its tail (my bird was an adult), indicating that all tail feathers can
be involved at the same time under certain circumstances. It thus looks like
the bird is definitely the Long-tailed Shrike moulting its tail feathers all at
the same time. As Alan mentioned it may have lost its tail for some reason and
be regrowing all tail feathers simultaneously. An interesting bird anyway and
another one to learn from as if I had found this bird before the Long-tailed
Shrike was known to be present I may have made a mistake in the identification
and thought it to be a hybrid shrike of some sort as Long-tailed Shrike had not
been recorded in Saudi Arabia prior to this bird.
