put very much food in cold storage. I have never seen many victims of the bird's 

 rapacity impaled upon thorns. Perhaps I should qualify this statement a bit 

 by saying that I have never seen many victims hanging up in one place. I have 

 watched carefully something like a score of the birds, and while every one occa- 

 sionally hung up one of its victims, there was nothing approaching the "general 

 storehouse" of food, so often described. It is my belief that this habit of im- 

 paling its prey upon thorns or of hanging it by the neck in a crotch is one that is 

 confined largely to the summer season, and especially to the nesting period. 



The northern shrike has been said by some writers to be a bully as well as a 

 butcher. I have never seen any evidence of this trait in its character. It does 

 not seem to care for what some small human souls consider the delight of cowing 

 weaker vessels. When the shrike gives chase to its feathered quarry it gives 

 chase for the sole purpose of obtaining food. While the bird is not a bully in 

 the sense in which I have written, it displays at times the cruelty of a fiend. It 

 has apparently something of the cat in its nature. It delights to play with its 

 prey after it has been seized, and by one swift stroke reduced to a state of help- 

 lessness. 



Every morning during the month of February, 1898, a shrike came to a 

 tree directly in front of my window on Pearson street. Chicago. The locality 

 abounded in sparrows, and it was for that reason the shrike was such a constant 

 visitor. The bird paid no attention to the faces at the window, and made its 

 excursions for victims in plain view. The shrike is not the most skilled hunter 

 in the world. About three out of four of his quests are bootless, but as it makes 

 many of them it never lacks for a meal. The Pearson street shrike one day 

 rounded the corner of the building on its way to its favorite perch, and encounter- 

 ing a sparrow midway struck it down in full flight. The shrike carried its strug- 

 gling victim to the usual tree. There it drilled a hole in the sparrow's skull 

 and then allowed the suffering, quivering creature to fall toward the ground. The 

 butcher followed with a swoop much like that of a hawk, and catching its prey 

 once more, bore it aloft and then dropped it again as it seemed for the very en- 

 joyment of witnessing suffering. Finally when the sparrow had fallen for the 

 third time, it reached the ground before the shrike could reseize it. The victim 

 bad strength enough to flutter into a small hole in a snow bank, where it was hid- 

 den from sight. The shrike made no attempt to recapture the sparrow. It 

 seemingly was a pure case of "out of sight, out of mind." In a few moments it 

 flew away in search of another victim. The sparrow was picked up from the 

 snow bank and put out if its misery, for it was still living. There was a hole in 

 its skull as round as though it had been punched with a conductor's ticket clip. 



It has been my experience that the northern shrike hunts most successfully 

 when it, so to speak, flies down its prey. If it gets a small bird well started out 

 into the open, and with cover at a long distance ahead, the shrike generally man- 

 ages to overtake and overpower its victim. If the quarry, however, is sought in 

 the underbrush or in the close twined branches of the treetop, it generally suc- 



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