^82 KNOWING BIRDS THROUGH STORIES 



with the shrike's habit claim that they impale these poor 

 insects for the fun of killing, and that they never return 

 to them afterwards. This may be true, but it certainly 

 was not true of my birds. I have many time seen them 

 return and eat insects they had impaled, and have even 

 seen them feed these to their young. 



My friend. Professor A. C. Holt, dean of Tusculum 

 College, tells me tliat when he was a boy he knew these 

 shrikes very well, and that he never knew them to impale 

 creatures for amusement merely. This corresponds to my 

 own experience, for I had known these birds for several 

 years, seeing them practically every day and spending 

 hours in the vicinity of their nests, before I discovered any 

 such habit. Cruel, you will say ! Yes, but no more cruel 

 than for fisherman to string their fish on a line or a 

 string of bark passed through the gills and to leave them 

 for hours or even days in the water, where every breath is 

 torture while they also suffer for lack of food. Nor is it 

 more cruel than the way we handle chickens in our mar- 

 kets. 



The shrike is accused of robbing other birds' nests, and 

 I presume in an emergency he does so; but I have seen as 

 many as three or four sparrows' and other small birds' 

 nests within a hundred feet of my shrike's nest and none 

 of them were ever disturbed; moreover the mother birds 

 showed no alarm when the shrike happened to alight near 

 their nests. I am convinced that shrikes feed entirely on 

 live insects and mice when they can get them. If the 

 food supply runs short, they store a supply when they 

 make a lucky find. If food should become even more 

 scarce and a bird's nest happened to be near, I do not doubt 

 that they would eat the young birds. Doubtless for this 



