HOW THE SHRIKE HUNTS. 247 



they must carry heavy objects differently than they might carry 

 light ones ? 



The character of the loggerhead shrike, our summer visitor, 

 seems to me scarcely to need much defence. If any questions 

 are asked, here is the picture of a mesquite branch which a 

 friend of mine brought me from Arizona as a sample of the 

 work of the white-rumped shrike. He said he had several 

 others, all with centipedes on them. A bird that spends 

 its time sticking centipedes on thorns, and killing Jerusalem 

 crickets, is worthy of encouragement. The Southern planter 

 will tell you that in his fields the shrikes kill mice like 

 cats ; and you yourself may find the beetles and grasshoppers 

 which she has caught, but not eaten, stuck upon the sharp spurs 

 of wire fences and behind slivers in the fence-rails. In Florida, 

 it is reported that they come day after day bringing their 

 grasshoppers- and beetles to eat them on some favorite spot, 

 as a tree stump, and that one of their dining tables may .be 

 known by the quantity of hard wing shards and legs of insects 

 dropped about it. So far as I know, the loggerhead shrike is 

 largely an insect eater. It may be that she eats little birds 

 now and then, and I would not invite her to build too near my 

 favorite chipping sparrows ; but her bird neighbors give her a 

 good name, and sit fearlessly in her spruce tree, while they 

 cry out in wrath if a crow, or a blackbird, or a cuckoo, or a 

 bluejay, comes too near their nests 



