It is also sometimes named jackie hangman or butcher bird due to its habit of impaling its prey on acacia thorns to store the food for later consumption.

In 1760 the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson included a description of the southern fiscal in his Ornithologie based on a specimen collected from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

He used the French name La pie-griesche du Cap de Bonne Espérance and the Latin Lanius capitis Bonae Spei.

[3] Although Brisson coined Latin names, these do not conform to the binomial system and are not recognised by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature.

[4] When in 1766 the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae for the twelfth edition, he added 240 species that had been previously described by Brisson.

[7] This is a fairly distinctive 21–23-cm long passerine with white underparts and black upperparts extending from the top of the head down to the tail.