Shrikes. 



Order, Passer es. 

 Family, Laniidae. 



621. NORTHERN SHRIKE. Lanius borealis. Robin size and 

 larger than its relative, the loggerhead. Slate color above and light 

 slate color beneath. Wings and tail black with a few white feathers. 

 Black patch runs horizontally backward from bill beyond the eye. 

 Slightly curved beak. 



622. LOGGERHEAD SHRIKE. Lanius ludovicianus. Nine inches 

 long. Bird mostly gray except wings, tail and cheeks, which are black. 

 White feathers in tail. Bill hooked. Very common in Black Hills. 



LOGGERHEAD SHRIKE. 



Sitting on his lookout, the dead limb of a tree that overlooks 

 an open space where the smallest birds have their feeding grounds, 

 there is a cannibalistic villian waiting and silently plotting a 

 multitude of crimes. Presently you will see him swoop down 

 upon them and such a scattering you never saw in your life. No 

 human beings ever fled before a cyclone with greater fear than 

 do the little birds at the approach of this outlaw, for some one of 

 them loses its life and its body is borne in the butcher's beak and 

 hung upon a thorn or upon the barb of a wire fence as a butcher 

 hangs his beef. 



I have seen that easy downward glide with hardly the move- 

 ment of a wing and with the speed of a ski-jumper at the foot 

 of his slide, and it seemed hardly possible that it ended in mur- 

 der for it was the very poetry of motion. 



Have you not seen little birds hanging on a barb? Perhaps 

 you have seen the little gopher dangling from a wire fence and 

 thought that the small boy had put him there. No, it was the 

 loggerhead shrike. And why does he hang them there? Because 

 he kills many times as much as he can eat. He just hungers 

 and thirsts for bird blood. 



