154 BIRbS AND BIRDS. 



rv. 



But let me change the strain and contemplate for 

 a few moments this feathered bandit, this bird 

 with the mark of Cain upon him Collyris boreatis, 

 the great shrike or butcher-bird. Usually, the char- 

 acter of a bird of prey is well defined ; there is no 

 mistaking him. His claws, his beak, his head, his 

 wings, in fact his whole build point to the fact that 

 he subsists upon live creatures ; he is armed to catch 

 them and to slay them. Every bird knows a hawk 

 and knows him from the start, and is on the lookout 

 for him. The hawk takes life, but he does it to 

 maintain his own, and it is a public and universally 

 known fact. Nature has sent him abroad in that 

 character and has advised all creatures of it. Not so 

 with the shrike ; here she has concealed the charac- 

 ter of a murderer under a form as innocent as that 

 of the robin. Feet, wings, tail, color, head, and gen- 

 eral form and size are all those of a song-bird 

 very much like that master songster, the mocking- 

 bird yet this bird is a regular Bluebeard among its 

 kind. Its only characteristic feature is its beak, the 

 upper mandible having two sharp processes and a 

 sharp hooked point. It cannot fly away to any dis- 

 tance with the bird it kills nor hold it in its claws to 

 feed upon it. It usually impales its victim upon a 

 thorn or thrusts it in the fork of a limb. For the 

 most part, however, its food seems to consist of in 

 lects spiders, grasshoppers, beetles, etc. It is the 



