OR BUTCHER BIRD. 93 



1 1 only takes a lunch of a small song-bird occasionally, as 

 the humming bird does of the spider. It selects very much 

 the same sort of location for its nest as the mocking birds, and 

 has much the same haunts ; and, in a word, I have no doubt 

 that these two birds are regarded with more thorough dread 

 and detestation by the small birds than all the hawks that ever 

 flew put together ; for while the mocking bird beats them sing- 

 ing until they are ashamed to hear their own voices ; he adds 

 insult to injury in frightening them out of their wits by his imp- 

 ish imitations. Then the shrike runs them in the same way, 

 but it is in bloody earnest, so far as he is concerned, so that the 

 timid little creatures must be as sadly puzzled between the 

 playful elf and its ghost-like image, as I was with my new 

 variety. There is another droll coincidence. The shrike is 

 not more the terror of the small birds, than the humming 

 bird is of the large ones. It is the most formidable enemy 

 the hawks and eagles have, and almost drives them mad 

 with its swift and torturing strokes at their eyes. I have 

 seen many an eagle flying as if possessed, with loud screams 

 of agony, while a pair of humming birds, coolly resting on 

 the top of its imperial crown, were making the feathers fly 

 therefrom in a long trail upon the air. 



"We have in America two varieties of the shrike. The 

 one exhibited in our plate is the loggerhead shrike, which is 

 in the act of stooping upon a painted finch. The habitation 

 of this shrike is principally in the southern and middle re- 

 gions of the United States, while the great American shrike 

 frequents from the middle States northward to the Canadas. 

 So audacious is this latter bird, and such the power of its neck 

 and shoulders, that I saw one that had just been captured in a 

 gentleman's parlor in Boston, during a late hard winter, that 

 had shattered the stout plate-glass of the window-pane in dash- 

 ing at a canary bird which it had perceived, caged, inside. 

 The little captive was slain by the savage aggressor before 

 rescue was possible on the part of those who witnessed the 

 scene. 



