PLATE I 

 RED-BACKED SHRIKE. Lanius collurio 



June 28M, 1898. The nest from which this photograph was taken was built 

 high up in a bush overgrown with wild roses near the town of Mildenhall in 

 Suffolk. It was about nine feet from the ground, and I had great difficulty 

 in getting my camera set up on a wooden trestle, which I borrowed from an 

 adjoining stackyard. 



The old birds were in a great state of excitement, and kept continually 

 alighting on a spray just above the nest, but in spite of all my efforts to do 

 so, I was unable to include them in the picture. 



The nest was large and bulky, rather larger outside than a Blackbird's 

 nest, and was almost entirely built of the dead rootlets of some species of 

 grass very loosely woven together. The lining was of black horse-hair, and 

 showed up the four pale bluish-green eggs beautifully. 



In a large hawthorn bush about thirty yards from the nest I found the 

 remains of two Blue Tits, a young Thrush, a young Pipit, two very much 

 dried-up frogs, and numbers of humble-bees and beetles, all impaled on thorns ; 

 and the ground under the bush was covered with the wing-cases of a large dark 

 blue beetle, and many feathers of Tits and Yellowhammers. Near another nest, 

 which I discovered in a tall hedge not far off, I found the four nestlings from 

 some Finch's nest all carefully stuck on thorns, portions of the backs of each 

 having already been eaten. This is sure evidence of the rapacity of these 

 little birds. 



