DUSKY, GRAY, AND SLATE-COLORED 3839 
ing of the so-called “ Butcher bird.” The favorite perch 
was a telegraph wire, and from there swoops were made 
downward into the grass with startling swiftness. Not 
a movement in the meadow escaped him, not a cricket 
could jump but he saw it, even fifty feet away, and 
caught it at the first trial. For the first week the food 
was swallowed by the adults and given to the young in 
a partially digested form by regurgitation. Then came 
an intermediate stage in which they received fresh food 
bitten up by the adult. After the nestlings were strong 
enough to help themselves at all, the insects were held 
firmly in the beak of the adult and pulled off, a bit at a 
time by the young bird. No food was hung up in the 
nest tree. 
When the young Shrikes were fully fledged and had 
left the nest tree, they still followed the parents about 
with open mouths and quivering wings, begging for food 
until they were nearly five weeks old. They still tore 
bits from insects held in the beak of the adult or im- 
paled on a barbed-wire fence, which was their favorite 
perch. When six weeks old, one of the young birds man- 
aged to capture a grasshopper, and I saw him trying to 
impale it on the fastening of a telegraph wire insulator, 
watched by an adult Shrike two feet away. 
Although usually silent except for a harsh note of 
alarm, both the California and the white-rumped shrike 
have a love song strikingly at variance with their repu- 
tation for wanton butchery. One can scarcely credit 
the shrike with the tenderness expressed by the sweet 
warble that comes from the nest tree when the satiny 
