Who would have thought that, a very rare bird appears to have been in the Netherlands more than a hundred years ago. And in Nuenen. The animal died there in 1909. It concerns the Siberian northern gray shrike: a bird from eastern Siberia. As far as we know, the animal had never been seen in our country. This is shown by research by the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre.
With the help of DNA research it has become clear that the Netherlands has had a visit from this Siberian northern gray shrike at least once. These birds breed in eastern Siberia.
Resident of Nuenen
Research by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center shows that one in Nuenen came to an end in 1909. The bird was brought in on 25 November of that year by Antonius Smulders from Nuenen to the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, the predecessor of Naturalis, the museum reports. via the nature website Nature Today.
The bird was mistaken for an ‘ordinary’ gray shrike. That was not so special at the time, because that bird species nested in the Netherlands until the 1950s. “Recent DNA research shows that it is a different species,” continues Naturalis. So it is a Siberian northern gray shrike.
Not just a house-garden-and-kitchen-great magpie
This is highly unusual, because in all of Europe (excluding Russia) this bird had only been seen once before. The animal normally breeds in Russia and northern China and Mongolia. The birds hibernate in Asian countries, but they normally do not venture further west than Kazakhstan.
The suspicion that the bird in the Naturalis collection was not just a house-garden-and-kitchen gray shrike already arose in 2014. An Israeli birdwatcher and artist Martin Brandsma already thought it was the Siberian species. Now, eight years later, they are finally right.