138 BULLETIN 19 7, UNITED STATES NATIONAL ]MUSEUM 



hoppers and crickets make up 39 percent. In August and September 

 these constitute 70 percent of the total food, though they are taken 

 in everj^ month of the year. Among the crickets, wliich are not so 

 acceptable as grasshoppers, the so-called wood cricket is often taken, 

 numbers of the genus Stenopelmatus being particularly noticeable. 

 These insects usually live under leaves and stones and avoid light but 

 not to the extent of remaining undetected by the remarkable vision 

 of the loggerhead. 



Beetles are eaten to the amount of somewhat in excess of 16 percent. 

 Ground beetles (Carabidae) and carrion beetles (Silphidae) com- 

 pose 7 percent of this total; tlie rest are harmful varieties. Ants 

 and wasps are represented by only 3 percent, the latter outnumbering 

 the former. Moths and caterpillars form 4 percent. Bugs, flies, and 

 a few other odd insects total 5 percent. 



Spiders make up 4 percent of the loggerhead's diet, while the verte- 

 brates (28 percent) include manmials, birds, and reptiles. Of these, 

 mice compose by far the bulk. A. H. Howell (1932) quotes Judd 

 (1898) as saying that mice are taken "at all seasons and in winter 

 comprise half the food." He adds that "birds make up only 8 percent 

 of the food for the year." Certainly, this predilection of the logger- 

 head for mice, and the fact that half the winter food is made up of 

 these animals, should go far to prove the great value of the shrike to 

 agricultural interests. Audubon went tlie length of saying that mice 

 "form the principal food of the grown birds at all seasons." 



Alexander Wilson (Wilson and Bonaparte, 1832) wrote that on the 

 rice plantations of Carolina and Georgia "it [the loggerhead] is pro- 

 tected for its usefulness in destroying mice." He describes it as sit- 

 ting near stacks of rice and "watching like a cat; and as soon as it 

 perceives a mouse, darts on it like a Hawk." Evidently the logger- 

 head was more appreciated in Carolina then than it is now. 



Occasionally, extraneous items appear in the shrike's food, or 

 attacks are made on forms not usually associated with its diet. N. C. 

 Longee, of Gainesville, Fla. (Howell, 1932), saw a shrike bring a 

 number of large, live cattle ticks to a barbed-wire fence and impale 

 them thereon. Howell once saw a lizard being eaten. F. M. Weston 

 (MS.) states that he witnessed near Pensacola, Fla., the chase of a 

 bat by a shrike on "a bright summer day," but the animal eluded two 

 attacks and escaped. The writer has seen a loggerhead chase a bat 

 once and failed to secure it. Weston adds that he once found a small 

 terrapin of "quarter-dollar size" that had been taken and impaled by 

 a loggerhead. E. S. Dingle, of Huger, S. C, writes (MS.) that he 

 saw a loggerhead kill a frog, fly away with it in the beak for a short 

 distance, and then transfer it to the feet in flight. The frog was car- 

 ried about 200 feet in this manner to a live-oak tree. 



Audubon (1842) quotes the Rev. John Bachman as saying: "I have 



