Australian Magpies, Currawongs and Butcherbirds, the 'no nonsense' birds'

In this post I want to delve into the world of one of our most familiar bird families, comprising big birds, mostly black and white, and generally pretty tough. They include some of our most familiar birds, and most loved, including the 2017 inaugural winner of the Guardian Australia/Birdlife Australia Bird of the Year poll. Ironically they also include some of our most feared and even hated birds - including that glorious winner! It's not just by chance that they're mostly black and white too. This is a combination that evolved to be seen - and remember that most non-bird vertebrates don't see colour the way we do, but black and white will stand out anyway. These birds are bold and often pugnacious and the pattern says that clearly, with the message 'the best way to deal with me is to keep your distance'. Other familiar unrelated birds with the same message include Magpie Larks and Willie Wagtails.

Australian Magpie, the 2017 Bird of the Year, looking menacing; for a few weeks a year 
some breeding males become hyper-aggressive to people or dogs passing through their
 territory, though each one seems to have a specific profile in their mind of who 
deserves to be attacked.

OK, a bit of family background (though you should skip the next two paragraphs if you'd prefer). These three bird groups, plus the woodswallows and the New Guinea peltops, make up the family Artamidae ('the butchers'). The name comes from the woodswallow genus, Artamus, which means either a butcher or murderer. It seems a bit over the top, but the father of modern taxonomy, Linnaeus, back in 1771 received a specimen of a White-breasted Woodswallow from the Phillipines. He thought it was one of the shrikes, Old World predators. Their genus was and is Lanius, another word for butcher, so when in 1817 the esteemed French ornithologist Louis Vieillot recognised the error and gave woodswallows their own genus he used another 'butcher' word in Artamus. 

It was to be another 90 years however before William Pycraft of the British Museum suggested a strong connection between the woodswallows and the apparently quite dissimilar Australian magpies and their cousins, based on skeleton evidence. This was largely ignored for another 70 years until Allan McEvey of the Victorian Museum came to the same conclusion, which was then backed up by DNA evidence. Anyway the point of all this is that now the new expanded family had been recognised it needed a new name, which had to be based on the first genus in the family to named. This was Artamus, so the former magpie/currawong/butcherbird family became part of Artamidae.  

If you sensibly decided two paras ago that you didn't need all that, welcome back. The family arose in Australia some 45 million years ago, and subsequently the ancestral woodswallows split off, then the New Guinean peltops, leaving the ancestors of the sub-group we're looking at today. As the country dried, the currawong ancestors parted ways with the butcherbirds-magpies. The tricky bit is that the next development wasn't a clear split between the magpies and butcherbirds, but the ancestor of both the magpies and the Black Butcherbird Melloria quoyi divided off, leaving only the main butcherbird group. 

Black Butcherbird, Atherton Tableland, tropical Queensland. It would be
clearer and simpler if we hadn't called this one a butcherbird - as I just said,
it's closer to the Australian magpies than to the true butcherbirds - but
the similarity was too obvious to be ignored.

In addition to the groups discussed here, there are 11 species of woodswallows (including five in Australia) and two species of peltops. Our focus today is on nine species; the Australian Magpie Gymnorhina tibicen, three currawongs (all Australian) and five Australian species of butcherbird (with the above proviso re the Black Butcherbird). There are also two butcherbirds which are restricted to New Guinea and nearby islands. All nine are medium-large songbirds with strong straight bills, with a hooked tip for the butcherbirds. In the magpie and butcherbirds this beak is silvery-bluish with a dark tip, but is all dark in the currawongs. Their plumage is mostly black and white, with some grey in some of them. 

Pied Bucherbird Cracticus nigrogularis, Tjoritja/West MacDonnells, central Australia.

Pied Currawong Strepera graculina, National Botanic Gardens, Canberra.

They all have powerful and, to my ears at least, mostly melodious songs and they call often. 

Grey Butcherbird Cracticus torquatus, Nowra, south coast NSW.

Pied Butcherbird, Bourke, northern central NSW.
(Disclosure; this bird has probably my favourite bird call in the world.)

Black Currawong Strepera fuliginosa, Tahune Forest, southern Tasmania. Currawongs are the only
members of the group carrying an Indigenous name. Like several of the Indigenous bird names
we know about, it is clearly onomatopoeic for the clear yodelling calls.There is uncertainty as
to whether it derives from the Jagawa language of south-east Queensland (which seems
better supported) or the Daruk language of the Sydney region. Either way it didn't appear
in English until well into the 20th century; before that they carried the awkward
combination names of bell-magpie or crow-shrike.

The butcherbirds and magpies are primarily predators of invertebrates and small mammals, reptiles and birds. The currawongs, despite their reputation in some quarters, are primarily fruit-eaters but will also hunt, especially when feeding chicks. All however can be very opportunistic with regard to food sources.

Pied Currawong eating Firethorn berries, Pyracantha sp, Canberra.
This is an invasive weed of nature reserves in Canberra and currawongs 
are major vectors of the seeds.

Male Magpie with freshly killed House Sparrow Passer domesticus, just over the
road from us in suburban Canberra.

This one really surprised me! Unfortunately it took me a little while to get a clear angle,
by which time the prey had been largely demolished. But this Pied Currawong, at the
Cotter Reserve just west of Canberra, had caught and was dismembering and eating
a Yabby Cherax destructor, a common south-eastern freshwater crayfish.

Butcherbirds and magpies in particular can become very accustomed to scavenging for food from outdoor eating areas, and accepting offerings from households (not from us, by the way).  

Pied Butcherbird showing unambiguous interest in the breakfast menu at Robin Hood
Station, near Cobbold Gorge, north Queensland gulf country.

Magpies eating seed (meant for parrots) on the NSW south coast. This was in winter
when preferred food sources would have been harder to find. Seeds would not normally
be part of their fairly strictly animal diet, but they can and do adapt when they must.

Coincidentally (referring to the somewhat convoluted story of Linnaeus confusing the woodswallow with the shrikes and what followed) early Sydney settlers widely used the name 'butcher-bird' from early on for the same birds that we do; this was what they had called shrikes in England. The connection was the habit of both shrikes and butcherbirds of storing surplus food in branch forks (which I've seen) and even on thorns or spikes of dead wood. Later in the 19th century barbed wire was adopted as an acceptable substitute for thorns. 

 

'Magpie' was likewise adopted directly from a familiar unrelated bird 'back home', the Eurasian Magpie Pica pica, which is a crow. However it is also black and white and that was enough. As we've seen, only the Currawongs retain an Indigenous name.

All build substantial stick nests and both parents feed the chicks and, especially the butcherbirds and magpies, defend them fiercely.  

Pied Currawong feeding large nestlings at Ginninderra Falls, west of Canberra.

There is a considerable amount of quite justifiable concern over the annual ritual of people having to evade (or failing to do so) the determined swooping of male Magpies during the spring breeding season. There is also a certain amount of inevitable urban mythology however. It seems that only about 10% of males are this aggressive, and it is unclear what determines it, though prior negative experiences are assumed to be behind it. A given male may be quite specific in his targeting, focussing perhaps on cyclists, or even singling out posties on cycles, or children or dogs. I confess that I don't cycle as much as I used to in spring after a couple of somewhat bloody encounters, though none of the territories in our immediate neighbourhood are danger zones. While I've not had a bad experience with butcherbirds, a good friend in Port Macquarie in north coastal NSW is regularly under fire when the local Grey Butcherbirds (but not the Pied Butcherbirds, which are also present) are nesting. With their hooked bills I suspect that they might be a worse proposition than the magpies. It might seem surprising, giving their fierce glare, intimidating beak and general heft, but currawongs are not usually seen as a threat in the same way as the magpies and butcherbirds are. 

Well, let me conclude by more formally introducing the species.

As I've alluded above, the Australian Magpie is one of the most familiar and recognised birds in the country and their powerful warbling territorial calls are among the most familiar bird calls in Australia. They are found throughout except for the north-western deserts, the Top End and the tip of Cape York Peninsula. There are up to nine subspecies recognised in Australia (plus another in a small area of southern Papua New Guinea just across the Torres Strait from Cape York Peninsula), grouped for convenience into three main plumage types, all relating to the feathers of the back.

The dominant form across most of the country is the Black-backed, where only the neck is white (for males) or grey (for females). There is also a white rump (mostly covered by the wings when not in flight) and a white bar across the wings.  

Male Black-backed Magpie, Wagga Wagga.

Female Black-backed Magpie, Canberra.

 Immature birds have mottled grey feathers instead of black. 

Immature Black-backed Magpie, Emerald, central Queensland.

In the south-east however the dominant form is the White-backed, named for the obvious reason.

Female White-backed Magpie, National Botanic Gardens, Canberra.

It has been proposed that this form arose in Tasmania. During the last glacial period but one, about 100,000 years ago when seas were lower and the Bass Strait was a plain, magpies arrived from the mainland and were then isolated for the next 70,000 years until the next glaciation. In this time the white-backed mutation appeared, and entered the mainland when the seas fell again. This is plausible but not universally accepted and last I read definitive proof was not available. 

 

What isn't disputed is that the white-backed birds are steadily extending north along the coast, breeding with the black-backed as they push. In my 40-odd years in Canberra I've seen the hybrid zone move north from the southern ACT to about Canberra.  The white-backeds are slightly larger and it seems likely that this gives them enough advantage to expand into the black-backeds range. However there is not a widening band of hybrid birds, but a northward-rolling hybrid zone about 120km wide. Nor are hybrids simply grey, but show a full range of mixture of black and white back feathers. Here are a couple of examples of hybrids, both from Canberra.

 

In south-western Australia males look like the white-backed form, but females have a distinctive mottled back, with the feathers edged in white.

Female Western Magpie, Dryandra forest. (A poor scan of an old, pre-digital, slide. Sorry.)

Based on the key work of Robert Carrick of CSIRO in the 1950s and 60s, several ‘levels’ of territory are recognised, ranging from optimum habitat, occupied by experienced successful birds which nearly always succeed in raising young, through more and more marginal territories, to the non-territorial non-breeding pool of ‘flock birds’. For magpies, 'optimal territory' means open foraging areas and tall trees for breeding. Such a complex system means that there are always ‘reserve’ birds waiting to fill gaps in territories, and birds gaining experience while waiting to get into a good territory. 

As suggested earlier, the distinctive Black Butcherbird of tropical Queensland and the Northern Territory plus most of New Guinea is actually more closely related to the magpies than to other butcherbirds, and a name other than butcherbird for it would make things easier, but common names don't work that way (despite periodic attempts to force them to do so). This bird has a powerful deeply pitched voice; 'organ-like' is often used to describe it and I probably can't do better than that. It is found in rainforests (like the photo above) but also in mangroves and riverine vegetation, and in places like Cairns and Darwin it has taken readily to urban living but we still seem to know surprisingly little of its breeding habits.

Black Butcherbird, Cairns Botanic Gardens. Perhaps more than other butcherbirds it spends time 
foraging for food on the ground, or 'perch and pounce' hunting, but unlike them it also spends time
hunting up in the canopy.

The other four Australian butcherbirds (plus two found only in New Guinea and nearby islands) are all in the genus Cracticus; two are found across most of Australia, the other two have more limited ranges in the tropics.They are relatively small but compact and powerful little predators of invertebrates, small mammals, birds and reptiles and, as I've mentioned, often tend to take more food than they can immediately use and store the surplus in branch forks and on sharp objects. I've heard them described as being like a kingfisher, and I can see why.

 

In general I associate Pied Butcherbirds with drier, more open inland plains and Grey Butcherbirds with denser vegetation and nearer the coast but it's really not that simple. North of Sydney the Pieds can come to the coast and the two species often overlap, though Greys seem to be the only one in mallee country. We have Grey Butcherbirds in the adjacent park to us in Canberra's suburban Weston Creek, and they are common right  up to the Snow Gums in the mountains, but Pieds only rarely visit the territory. They are fairly regularly sighted in an hour or so drive to the north-west of here though. 

 

Both Pieds and Greys have loud carrying calls, but the Grey's strident warble, while undeniably pleasant, doesn't have for me the breath-taking beauty of the Pied's performance. That always makes me stop to listen, and to me is one of the defining sounds of 'the west'. It is pure and rich and seemingly every note is considered (yes I'm doubtless being anthropomorphic but it's hard not to be when using words to describe a totally different sound). Moreover it can seem like a complete performance sometimes, stretching up with the high notes and bending down for the low ones. It can be heard by day or night, especially with a full moon.

Pied Butcherbird in banksia heathland at Lake Logue Nature Reserve north of Perth.
They are dramatically black and white, with full black hood and black back, and
there should be no confusion with the Grey Butcherbird.

Grey Butcherbird foraging on the ground at Ulladulla Heathland Reserve,
south coast NSW. The white throat and grey back are clear here.

Where confusion could arise is with immature birds, but even here the 'shadow' of the hood is fairly evident in young Pieds.

Immature Pied Butcherbird, Longreach Waterhole, in the semi-arid zone 700k south of Darwin.
The hood is still pale brown at this age.

Immature Grey Butcherbird in our small Canberra back yard.
The cap and back are brown rather than white and the underside is mottled
with no colouration under the chin.

On Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland is a third species, the Black-backed Butcherbird Cracticus mentalis which is also found across the Torres Strait in southern New Guinea. In Queensland it is a bird of the savannah woodlands; around our camp in Rinyirru NP, north-west of Cooktown, they seemed to occupy the dense stands of paperbarks Melaleuca sp. by Sweetwater Lagoon.

Black-backed Butcherbird, Rinyirru NP. I just couldn't get any closer to them than this
and they retreated to foliage when I tried to approach. However, as unsatisfactory as it is,
this photo does show its characteristics. It has a black cap and white throat like a Grey,
but a much wider white collar, and the rest is black and white. The lack of a full black
hood and the extensive white in the wings tell us that it's not a Pied either.

The Silver-backed Butcherbird Cracticus argenteus is found across the Top End and the Kimberley, in riverine forest and vine scrub, and thickets in sandstone gorges. It is not particularly uncommon and I've seen it but for some reason never taken a photo. I'll have to rectify that one day. It's like a Grey Butcherbird but with pale silver-grey back and black wings.

Silver-backed Butcherbird, courtesy Graham Winterflood on Wikipedia.

Alone among the three groups we're exploring today, only the currawongs (three species) are all restricted to Australia.

They are large songbirds with heavy bills and staring yellow eyes and smaller birds tend to avoid them. We spent time at a series of hides facing raised water troughs in the mallee at Gluepot Reserve north of the Murray River in South Australia, and when a group of Grey Currawongs arrived they rapidly had the facilities to themselves. It felt as though we were watching a group of threatening bikies bursting into a suburban bar. Yes, being anthropomorphic again, sorry!

Grey Currawongs Strepera versicolor, Gluepot Reserve. Yes I know they're black, not grey, but
this is a confusingly variable species, with distinctive subspecies. We'll come back to that.

The most familiar currawong to most Australians, and the first one encountered by the British settlers, was the Pied Currawong Strepera graculina, found right along the east coast of the mainland almost to the tip of Cape York Peninsula, but for some reason they've not crossed the narrow strait to New Guinea. At one stage though they made a far more extensive ocean crossing to Lord Howe Island where they founded an endemic subspecies.  

Juvenile Lord Howe Island Pied Currawong. Though it is less obvious in this youngster,
this subspecies has less white in the plumage and a more massive bill.

Pied Currawongs are all black except for white rumps, vents, tail tips and a broad band across the wing in flight. They are loud and call much of the time; one of their commonest calls around here (Canberra) was interpreted for me once as a plummy falsetto 'hark-hark-the-lark', and I can't hear it any other way now. There are various other carrying calls too, including one that sounds disturbingly like a wolf whistle. Locally they traditionally all moved up into the mountains to breed.

Pied Currawong investigating a bird hide at Jerrabomberra Wetlands NR in Canberra.
They are inquisitive and without evident fear of humans.

When I arrived here in 1980 Pied Currawongs nesting in Canberra was almost unknown, but they've adapted to our gardens with their year-round supplies of berries and many now stay down to breed. This raises antipathy from many people who are shocked when a small bird's nest in their yard is robbed of eggs or chicks by currawongs. There are a couple of observations I'd like need to make about this. Firstly they are primarily fruit-eaters, and most of their meat comes from insects, especially stick insects in the canopy of eucalypt forests. It is only when feeding growing chicks that they turn strongly to nest-robbing to provide protein. Secondly it is because we've offered them an easy living in town that many now take advantage of it, so we can witness behaviour that would otherwise be taking place out of sight up in the mountains. Up there of course all of the robbed nests would be of native bird species, while in suburbia many of the morsels fed to the currawong broods are of exotic species, such as blackbirds and sparrows. (It may be seen as unfortunate that hollow-nesting exotics such as starlings and mynas are largely safe from nest predation.)  

Grey Currawongs coexist with Pieds around here, but are far less common - intuitively it feels like their number ratios are about one to a hundred, but don't quote me! However I recall that a few decades back they weren't that uncommon in Canberra, and I think that their decline down here - but not apparently up in the mountains - has coincided with the year-round increase in Pied Currawongs in suburbia. Their calls are very different, with the Grey's being a clear ringing note. They are indeed ashy grey.

Grey Currawong at the Namadgi National Park's Visitor Information Centre
south of Canberra..

However the Greys lack the Pied Currawong's white rump. This becomes relevant in western Victoria where the Grey Currawong race is black (the same race as the birds at the Gluepot hide photo above) and both they and the Pied Currawongs in that part of the world have very little white in the wing. 

Grey Currawong at Glenelg River NP in far south-western Victoria, black like a
Pied Currawong but clearly showing the lack of a white rump.

Further west across the mallee country and into Western Australia they are noticeably browner.

'Brown' Grey Currawong in Dhilba Guuranda-Innes NP, at the foot of 
Yorke Peninsula in South Australia.

The Tasmanian race of the Grey Currawong is also black and has a distinctly different call which the inimitable Graham Pizzey in his classic bird guide describes as 'like striking [an] anvil', hence its local name of Clinking Currawong. This is fortunate for us, because in Tasmania distinguishing the Grey Currawong is even trickier with regard to plumage. In the east and north of the state they coexist with the Tasmanian endemic Black Currawong whose body is all black, so the Grey's lack of white rump doesn't help us here. However the Grey's broad white wing flashes and white vent are good indicators. The Black Currawong Strepera fuliginosa really is all black except for the tail tip and wing tips and its call too is more like a Pied Currawong, rather than the 'clink' of the Grey. It is found throughout the state.

Black Currawong checking for handouts (a typical currawong characteristic) 
at Tahune Forest, south of Hobart. 

So there we have it, a brief gathering of a subfamily of loud, imposing and, in my opinion at least, fascinating Australian birds. If you're reading this in Australia I'm sure you're already familiar with at least some of them and perhaps you've learnt something you didn't know, and are now glad that you do. I hope so. In any case, thanks for being here. 

 

Magpie against the moon, Arkaroola, far northern Ikara/Flinders Ranges, South Australia.

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Borrowed Bird Names

I've been toying with the idea of this post - comparing the Australian birds whose names have been 'borrowed' from European birds with the 'originals' - for quite some time but without the illustrative material to do it. Our recent holiday in Ireland has finally given me the opportunity to take photos of some of these birds, so we can now see and compare the local species with those originals. For this post I have drawn heavily on the research for Australian Bird Names; origins and meanings, published by CSIRO and now in a revised second edition, which I co-wrote with my friend and colleague Jeannie Gray. 

I won't tell the stories of these origins in full here, as some are really quite convoluted, but the book's in libraries if you're interested. It's going to be primarily a photo essay with the abbreviated stories in the captions. Where possible I've used photos of both the species the name was based on, and the Australian species to which the name was probably originally applied, but sometimes that still hasn't been possible so I've used closely related and similar species to get the idea over. Often you'll find that quite a leap of the imagination is required to see what our forebears saw! Usually these names were applied by British colonists in the early days of the foreign settlement of Australia, mostly people with some familiarity with the British birds but with no knowledge or interest in actual relationships. Moreover they were often homesick and longing for some familiarity in  a very strange land. (They could of course have asked the people who'd had names for the birds for thousands of years but that wouldn't have occurred to most of them.)

We'll start with some obvious and straightforward ones, where a name was directly applied based on superficial similarities, and come back to some of them when more convoluted name combinations are involved.

Eurasian Magpie Pica pica, Dublin. This is a very common and conspicuous bird,
 a member of the crow family, found right across northern Europe and Asia.

Australian Magpie Gymnorhina tibicen, Wagga Wagga. Yes it's large and conspicuously
black and while, but that's about it really! Its family Artamidae includes currawongs,
butcherbirds and woodswallows, of which all but the woodswallows are
confined to Australia and New Guinea.

European Robin Erithacus rubecula, Donegal, Ireland. This is a very engaging and
boldly curious little Old World flycatcher which would have been familiar to many of the colonists.

 

Flame Robin Petroica phoenicea, Namadgi National Park, ACT. It seems to me that
the name robin for Australian birds, which arose early in the Sydney colony,
could have been initially applied either to this species (especially in winter when it
came down from the mountains) or the Scarlet Robin, but most likely both.
In either case the resemblance again is pretty sketchy, and while there are pink,
yellow and black-and-white Australian robins, there are no orange ones.

Southern House Wren Troglodytes musculus, Chilean Patagonia. This is in the same
genus as the Eurasian Wren T. troglodytes, but I found the latter to be very difficult
to photograph. However this image is essentially what our forebears were thinking
of when they named the Australian 'wrens'.

Female Superb Fairywren Malurus cyaneus, National Botanic Gardens, Canberra
(where I think all the wrens have been banded by ANU students and other researchers).
Yet again the resemblance is vague - small, brown, cock-tailed and diving into bushes is
about it. And of course it entirely ignores the very colourful males in breeding season.
Nonetheless 'wren' was used from the very early days of the colony, initially for this
species, but it was later expanded to scrubwren, emuwren, grasswren, heathwren etc, for
more or less closely related groups. (The group name 'fairywren' was only coined
in the 20th century.)

Red-billed Chough Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax, Great Saltee Island, Ireland.
This is another crow, one of just two members of the genus, mostly associated
with mountains or coastal cliffs, where they typically forage on nearby short
grassland, as this one was.

White-winged Choughs Corcorax melanorhamphos, in Canberra.
They are black and have a curved bill, but neither bill or legs are red, though
their eyes are, all in contrast to the original chough. They are in a uniquely
Australian family of just two species of mud nest builders (with the Apostlebird).
In this case most of the settlers wouldn't have been familiar with the European chough
which lived in pretty remote places; it was the scientists who named it and were
badly led astray by the superficial resemblance, even into the early 20th century.

Pied (or White) Wagtail Motacilla alba, Cork, Ireland. A familiar species across
a huge range covering Europe, all of Asia and some of North Africa. The family
Motacillidae includes wagtails and pipits, of which only one pipit species
is found in Australia. Significantly, in this context, the name Willy-wagtail
was apparently applied to it (according to the authoritative Australian National
Dictionary) but only on the Isle of Man and in Northern Ireland.

 

Willie Wagtail Rhipidura leucophrys (and two species of honeyeater) Gluepot Reserve,
South Australia. This is an odd and somewhat mysterious story about one of Australia's
most familiar and fondly regarded birds. The oldest record we can find for the name
is in a south-east Queensland newspaper in 1882, though earlier oral usage seems likely.
The Australian National Dictionary (see previous caption) asserts that the name
was transferred to our bird but doesn't explain the late arrival of the name.
However on balance it would seem a huge coincidence if there was no connection.

Welcome Swallows Hirundo neoxena, Canberra. This species is very similar to and
closely related to the Barn Swallow H. rustica, which would have been very familiar
to British settlers and found throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere. In fact
I suspect that most of them would have just referred to both species as 'the swallow'
without distinguishing them.

Dusky Woodswallow Artamus cyanopterus family near Canberra. The name Wood Swallow
was applied to it early in the days of the Sydney colony (allegedly because of its
habit of perching on tree stumps) and often just elided to 'swallow', being lumped in
with 'other' swallows until the end of the 19th century. This was based purely on its habit
of soaring and catching insects in the air, as do 'real' swallows'; as mentioned earlier
the woodswallows are in the same family as magpies, currawongs and butcherbirds.

Mixed flock of woodswallows hunting insects over the Gulf Country savannah
of tropical Queensland.

But things started to get a lot sillier as the essential unfamiliarity of most Australian birds overwhelmed people trying to fit them into familiar boxes. They often felt obliged to coin combined forms that were usually, quite frankly, weird. Here are some of these combinations that we still use today.

For instance if we put 'magpie' into a name (see previous photo) it implies black and white, but what other bird did someone blend with it?

Ideally I'd have used a photo of a Eurasian Skylark Alauda arvensis, which is the lark the
new colonists would have been thinking of, but I haven't quite managed one, so this
similar and related Spike-heeled Lark from northern South Africa Chersomanes albofasciata
will have to stand in. It hardly matters as neither would seem to have anything in common
with one of our commonest birds which now shares their name.

Magpie-lark Grallina cyanoleuca, Canberra. I can't ague with the black-and-white implication
(indeed I grew up in Adelaide calling them Murray Magpies, for the river, because their
mud nests require them to live near water). But a lark? Hardly, but the colonists
were using this name from the early days of Sydney. This one has always eluded me.
Larks are classically renowned for their song (eg Vaughan Williams' Lark Ascending)
but while I love the stroppy Magpie-larks, it's not for their singing prowess!

The shrikes, family Laniidae, are a largely northern hemisphere family of small to medium predatory songbirds and while they are not naturally found in Australia, their name recurs in compound bird names here. Here the reference is to their strong straight hooked bill. The best illustrations I have of this are from true shrikes but which don't carry 'shrike' in their name, but the colonists were thinking of closely related birds in the same genus and with this bill when they scattered the name among the Australian birdscape.

Taita Fiscal Lanius dorsalis, Serengeti NP, Tanzania.

Well if a bird had such a bill and sang beautifully like other birds they'd known, why not call it a shrike-thrush? (Rhetorical question by the way.)

Song Thrush Turdus philomelos, a familiar and famed singer found across Europe,
western Asia and North Africa.

So we have the group name of some of our great songsters, the shrikethrushes. Unlike most of those we've looked at here so far, this was not a spontaneous 'folk' name, but a translation of the genus name coined by the collaborating ornithologists Nicholas Vigors (Irish) and Thomas Horsfield (US) in 1827.

Grey Shrikethrush Colluricincla harmonica, Canberra. I hope you know the call
(if not click on any of these) but the predatory hooked beak is clear here.

OK, what if it has (sort of) such a beak but is black and yellow? Is there a British contender for the 'shrike' name here? Of course there is if you're determined to find it.

Great Tits Parus major are actually not bright yellow, as this Irish one shows,
but the black, white and yellow pattern is distinctive, leading to...

... Eastern Shriketit Falcunculus frontatus, near Forbes, central western NSW.
This name appears to have been first applied by the hugely influential John Gould
in his 1848 7 volume Birds of Australia. He also commented on the similarity
of its foraging behaviour to that of the quite unrelated European tits.

And one more 'shrike'-based compound name, the cuckoo-shrikes. My European Common Cuckoo Cuculus canorus photos are not usable, but the Australian Pallid Cuckoo Heteroscenes pallidus is a good 'body double' for it - indeed until fairly recently it was placed in the same genus. 

Pallid Cuckoo, Canberra.

Which together apparently make a cuckoo-shrike!

Black-faced Cuckoo-shrike Coracina novaehollandiae, north coast NSW.
Everything about this name is mysterious, though one may imagine the dipping flight to
resemble that of a Cuculus cuckoo, plus the hook-tipped shrike beak. However the name
appeared without any obvious prompting in the late 19th century (before that they were
mostly called caterpillar-eaters) and while the group is found throughout southern Africa,
south and south-eastern Asia and the west Pacific, there is circumstantial evidence
that the name arose in Australia. But that's all I've got, sorry!

Back to the thrush for a moment. It has unwittingly been complicit in another of the Great Mysteries of Australian bird names, along with another entirely unrelated bird group.

Brown Quail Synoicus ypsilophorus, north coast NSW. A common and widespread bird
in Australia and New Guinea, very similar to the Common Quail Coturnix coturnix of Europe,
Asia and Africa which many of the colonists would have known.

But put them together and you apparently get a quail-thrush - or at least the eminent and generally very sensible Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union (RAOU) committee tasked with preparing a final definitive list of Australian bird names in 1926 thought you did. Indeed they thought it was more appropriate than the hitherto prevailing 'ground-bird' name, though they didn't venture to explain themselves; I personally think that the port decanter was involved.

Female Spotted Quail-thrush Cinclosoma punctatum, Brindabella Ranges above Canberra.
OK, it lives mostly on the ground (like lots of other birds) and sort of sings - though sort of
not at all like any thrush that I know. Hmm.
The males tend to be more brightly coloured, not that that helps eitheer.

Male Copperback Quail-Thrush C. clarum, near Norseman, Western Australia.

And that's probably enough of these mind-twisting weird name inventions. But I'll finish with two  quite different bird name stories, both brought to the front of my mind in Ireland, which I think are worth mentioning. The first is a much more convincing use of a call than the thrush examples, to name an unrelated bird.

At one stage I stepped out of the car on the Atlantic coast and was immediately challenged by the unmistakable call [I'd suggest you listen to the 7th example, by Nick Talbot, if you're interested] of an Australian Bush Stone-curlew Burhinus grallarius.  

 

Bush Stone-curlew Darwin, Northern Territory.

Fortunately for my mental health I quickly remembered why our bird is so-called. In fact the group name arose in England, where another member of the genus lives (Eurasian Stone-curlew B. oedicnemus) in rocky drier habitats. And I'm getting to the point! Its wailing nocturnal call is remarkably similar to that of the Eurasian Curlew Numenius arquata, a large shore wader with a very long down-curved bill, which of course was what I heard in Ireland. In Australia the Bush Stone-curlew is often referred to as simply 'the curlew'.

Far Eastern Curlew Numenius madagascariensis in Cairns, tropical Queensland.
This species, which breeds in Siberia, is very similar to the Eurasian Curlew, and
with similar calls, but didn't influence the naming of the Australian stone-curlew. However it does
help us to envisage the 'model' for the original name.

And finally, and somewhat tangentially, another bird-derived name, though this time not applied to another bird.

This is a Rook Corvus frugilegus, a common Eurasian crow, here in Ireland.

And this is a Rook nesting colony...

... called, yep, a rookery.

But, for reasons uncertain the term came to be used for breeding colonies of seabirds in particular. So these birds, none at all crow-like, are among those which breed in rookeries!

Magellanic Penguins Spheniscus magellanicus, Strait of Magellan, Chilean Pagagonia.

Mixed seabirds, but mostly Guanay Cormorants Leucocarbo bougainvilliorum, Islas Ballasteras, Peru.

Northern Gannets Morus bassanus (part of a much larger colony), Great Saltee Island,
County Wexford, Ireland.

And that might be enough of such silliness, which says a lot more about us and our language than it does about the birds. I think it's interesting though, and it's an excuse to showcase some birds, which can never be a bad thing.

NEXT POSTING THURSDAY 26 JUNE

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