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plucked feathers, and wool. Some contained as many as six eggs, these being bluish 

 green in ground color, spotted and blotched with greenish brown. This shrike 

 feeds principally upon beetles, butterflies, grasshoppers, and other insects. Its flight, 

 like that of its congeners, is undulating, but easy and comparatively noiseless; the 

 bird skimming through the air like a partridge for a moment or two before it alights 

 on some perch, onto which it drops with a scuffle of the wings. The song is a not 

 unmusical chatter, something like the twitter of the swallow or starling, but louder 

 and mixed with some harsher notes. The bird has a variety of notes, some very 

 harsh, which are probably alarm notes, and others somewhat plaintive. In the 



LESSER GRAY SHRIKE. 

 (One-half natural size.) 



adult the forehead, lores, and ear coverts are deep black; the crown of the head and 

 all the upper parts pearl gray; the wings black, the primaries having white bases 

 which form a single white wing bar; the tail is black and white; and the under parts 

 are white, tinged with reddish buff. 



The red-backed shrike (L. collurid}, which is represented in the lower 

 figure of the illustration on p. 1632, is another migratory bird, spend- 

 ing many months of the year beneath the burning rays of an African 

 sun, and returning northward in the spring of the year in order to rear a fresh 



Red-Backed 

 Shrike 



