I chanced on (what I think is) a brown shrike lounging around the concrete roof deck of my brother’s house, which is just outside our dining room windows. These shots were taken at a distance of about 8 feet away, one of those rare moments when I managed to get pretty close to the subject bird.

Not having the time to set up a tripod (lest the photo-op pass me by), I anchored my elbows on the window frame to minimize camera shake. It worked quite well. These are probably so far the clearest pictures I’ve ever shot of any bird, excepting those of the Eurasian Tree Sparrow (or the local maya) which I haven’t gotten around to posting yet.

If you’re wondering why the color of the concrete roof deck shifted from an industrial grey in the first picture to a warmer brownish hue in the subsequent photos, I think I adjusted the white balance from Shade to Auto (or the other way around). I probably shouldn’t have;  the original grey background contrasted better with the shrike and the out-of-focus yellowed caimito leaf.

According to some facts I gathered from one Taiwan site of an ecological park, and based on the scalloped underparts and the lack of the sharp bandit mask coloring found in males, what we have here appears to be a young (or immature) female specimen.

Want to know more about the brown shrike or Lanius cristatus? Go visit Wikipedia’s entry as well as the Internet Bird Collection page which even features videos and a sound recording of its alarm call.

Posted in: Better Earth, Photo Gallery | | November 2009