Some Curious Notes from My Diary 



driven off by the combined efforts of the shrikes, and I 

 naturally concluded the latter had a nest containing 

 young ones somewhere near by, which they were defend- 

 ing with the super courage born of parenthood. Not a 

 bit of it. To my astonishment I discovered that the 

 quarrel was over the possession of a newly slain short- 

 tailed field vole. Whether the jay or the shrikes had 

 killed the rodent it is, of course, impossible to say. 



If feathered folk were classified by their habits the 

 red-backed shrike would find a place amongst the birds 

 of prey, for its methods and manners are essentially 

 hawk-like. One day I came upon a male butcher bird 

 engaged in feeding a family of five lusty young ones in 

 a nest I had found a week previously on the old rifle- 

 range. I could not understand why the bird kept on 

 flying from his nesting bush to a diminutive thorn grow- 

 ing a few yards away and then came back again, but 

 upon a closer approach discovered to my horror that 

 he was engaged in tearing to pieces the pathetically 

 small body of a baby blue tit, which he had just slain 

 and spitted, and giving the fragments to his own 

 offspring. The crude, healthy instinct of avenging the 

 wrongs of the weak and defenceless surged up within 

 me with such primitive force that I think if I had had a 

 gun in my hands at the moment I would have shot 

 him. 



In wandering through the brevities of my diary for 

 the last quarter of a century I have come upon some 



