1909 
March 25 
****** **** 
Sparcow 
impaled 
by Shrike 
Otter killed 
in 
Sudbury 
River 
H about 187 5 11 
Henry P. Richardson brought me the dried corpse of a 
House Sparrow impaled on a twig of an apple tree fully one- 
quarter of an inch in thickness which is driven down behind 
the sternum, between the forks of the wishbone. He found 
it last winter in an alder swamp near Strawberry Hill, 
Concord. Without doubt it must have been killed and trans¬ 
fixed by a Shrike. I have never before known a Shrike to 
make use of so stout a skewer, however. 
. P. Richardson tells me he has never seen a living 
Otter, nor the tracks of one, in Concord but that in the 
early *70* s he examined a freshly killed one that Sam 
Haines (or "Quadruped Haines", as he was facetiously called 
because he was crippled and used his hands in crawling about) 
took in the Sudbury River somewhere not far below Heath's 
Bridge. Haines was in his boat (he was an inveterate 
fisherman and muskrat hunter, as I well remember, for I often 
used to meet and talk with him on the river in the '70's) 
fishing for minnows for bait with a short, heavy, oak whip¬ 
stock which he was using as a rod. The Otter, coming up 
from a dive, broke the surface of the water so near him 
that he caught it by the tail just as it was disappearing 
again and quickly killed it with his whip-stock by a few 
blows on the head. At least this is Richardson's Story. 
