Laniidae

Hybridization occurs in only one genus of Shrikes, Lanius.

In Western Siberia, Red-backed Shrike (L. collurio) and Brown Shrike (L. cristatus) interbreed and produce fertile offspring (Kryukov & Gureev, 1997).

And in North America, two subspecies of Loggerhead Shrike (L. ludovicianus migrans  and L. l. excubitorides) hybridize along a contact zone (Vallianatos, Lougheed & Boag, 2001).

Loggerhead Shrike (L. ludovicianus)

Loggerhead Shrike (L. ludovicianus)

 

References

Kryukov, A. & Gureev, S. (1997). New data on interrelations of red-backed and brown shrikes (Lanius collurio and L. cristatus, Aves) in zone of sympatry. Zoologicheskii zhurnal 76, 1193-1201.

Vallianatos, M., Lougheed, S. C. & Boag, P. T. (2001). Phylogeography and genetic characteristics of a putative secondary-contact zone of the loggerhead shrike in central and eastern North America. Canadian Journal of Zoology-Revue Canadienne De Zoologie 79, 2221-2227.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s