DUSKY, GRAY, AND SLATE-COLORED 339 



ing of the so-called " Butcher bird." The favorite perch 

 was a telegraph wire, and from there swoops were made 

 downward into the grass with startling swiftness. Not 

 a movement in the meadow escaped him, not a cricket 

 could jump but he saw it, even fifty feet away, and 

 caught it at the first trial. For the first week the food 

 was swallowed by the adults and given to the young in 

 a partially digested form by regurgitation. Then came 

 an intermediate stage in which they received fresh food 

 bitten up by the adult. After the nestlings were strong 

 enough to help themselves at all, the insects were held 

 firmly in the beak of the adult and pulled off, a bit at a 

 time by the young bird. No food was hung up in the 

 nest tree. 



When the young Shrikes were fully fledged and had 

 left the nest tree, they still followed the parents about 

 with open mouths and quivering wings, begging for food 

 until they were nearly five weeks old. They still tore 

 bits from insects held in the beak of the adult or im- 

 paled on a barbed-wire fence, which was their favorite 

 perch. When six weeks old, one of the young birds man- 

 aged to capture a grasshopper, and I saw him trying to 

 impale it on the fastening of a telegraph wire insulator, 

 watched by an adult Shrike two feet away. 



Although usually silent except for a harsh note of 

 alarm, both the California and the white-rumped shrike 

 have a love song strikingly at variance with their repu- 

 tation for wanton butchery. One can scarcely credit 

 the shrike with the tenderness expressed by the sweet 

 warble that comes from the nest tree when the satiny 



