The woodchat shrike was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial name Lanius senator.

[2] Linnaeus based his description on the "red headed butcher-bird" that had been described and illustrated in 1734 by the English naturalist Eleazar Albin in the second volume of his A Natural History of Birds.

[6] The common name "woodchat" is an Anglicisation of German waldkatze, literally "woodcat",[7] and "shrike" is from Old English scríc, "shriek", referring to the shrill call.

The range extends from Portugal to Greece, Turkey, Iraq and Iran, and in the Arabian Peninsula including Bahrain and Kuwait, and from Mauritania and Western Sahara in northern Africa to Libya.

This bird overwinters in tropical central Africa, its winter range extending from Senegal to Sudan and Ethiopia in the east and southwards to Gabon.

[1] This species often overshoots its breeding range on spring migration, and is a rare, but annual, visitor to Great Britain.

The nest is a strong cup of plant material which is lined with wool, hair, fine roots, cobwebs and lichen.

[13] The longest lived woodchat shrike recorded by ring-recovery data is 5 years and eight months for a bird found dead in Germany.

It hunts by perching on an exposed lookout such as on a branch of a tree or on a fence, typically 2–6 m (7–20 ft) above the ground, and then dropping or gliding down to its prey.