: Bird Neighbors An Introductory Acquaintance with One Hundred and Fifty Birds Commonly Found in the Gardens Meadows and Woods About Our Homes by Blanchan Neltje Burroughs John Author Of Introduction Etc - Birds

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ates to the plains.

It is not easy, even at a slight distance, to distinguish the loggerhead from the Northern shrike. Both have the pernicious habit of killing insects and smaller birds and impaling them on thorns; both have the peculiarity of flying, with strong, vigorous flight and much wing-flapping, close along the ground, then suddenly rising to a tree, on the lookout for prey. Their harsh, unmusical call-notes are similar too, and their hawk-like method of dropping suddenly upon a victim on the ground below is identical. Indeed, the same description very nearly answers for both birds. But there is one very important difference. While the Northern shrike is a winter visitor, the loggerhead, being his Southern counterpart, does not arrive until after the frost is out of the ground, and he can be sure of a truly warm welcome. A lesser distinction between the only two representatives of the shrike family that frequent our neighborhood--and they are two too many--is in the smaller size of the loggerhead and its lighter-gray plumage. But as both these birds select some high, commanding position, like a distended branch near the tree-top, a cupola, house-peak, lightning-rod, telegraph wire, or weather-vane, the better to detect a passing dinner, it would be quite impossible at such a distance to know which shrike was sitting up there silently plotting villainies, without remembering the season when each may be expected.

Northern Shrike

Shrike family

"Matching the bravest of the brave among birds of prey in deeds of daring, and no less relentless than reckless, the shrike compels that sort of deference, not unmixed with indignation, we are accustomed to accord to creatures of seeming insignificance whose exploits demand much strength, great spirit, and insatiate love for carnage. We cannot be indifferent to the marauder who takes his own wherever he finds it--a feudal baron who holds his own with undisputed sway--and an ogre whose victims are so many more than he can eat, that he actually keeps a private graveyard for the balance." Who is honestly able to give the shrikes a better character than Dr. Coues, just quoted? A few offer them questionable defence by recording the large numbers of English sparrows they kill in a season, as if wanton carnage were ever justifiable.

Not even a hawk itself can produce the consternation among a flock of sparrows that the harsh, rasping voice of the butcher-bird creates, for escape they well know to be difficult before the small ogre swoops down upon his victim, and carries it off to impale it on a thorn or frozen twig, there to devour it later piecemeal. Every shrike thus either impales or else hangs up, as a butcher does his meat, more little birds of many kinds, field-mice, grasshoppers, and other large insects than it can hope to devour in a week of bloody orgies. Field-mice are perhaps its favorite diet, but even snakes are not disdained.

More contemptible than the actual slaughter of its victims, if possible, is the method by which the shrike often lures and sneaks upon his prey. Hiding in a clump of bushes in the meadow or garden, he imitates with fiendish cleverness the call-notes of little birds that come in cheerful response, hopping and flitting within easy range of him. His bloody work is finished in a trice. Usually, however, it must be owned, the shrike's hunting habits are the reverse of sneaking. Perched on a point of vantage on some tree-top or weather-vane, his hawk-like eye can detect a grasshopper going through the grass fifty yards away.

What is our surprise when some fine warm day in March, just before our butcher, ogre, sneak, and fiend leaves us for colder regions, to hear him break out into song! Love has warmed even his cold heart, and with sweet, warbled notes on the tip of a beak that but yesterday was reeking with his victim's blood, he starts for Canada, leaving behind him the only good impression he has made during a long winter's visit.

Bohemian Waxwing

Waxwing family

When Charles Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, who was the first to count this common waxwing of Europe and Asia among the birds of North America, published an account of it in his "Synopsis," it was considered a very rare bird indeed. It may be these waxwings have greatly increased, but however uncommon they may still be considered, certainly no one who had ever seen a flock containing more than a thousand of them, resting on the trees of a lawn within sight of New York City, as the writer has done, could be expected to consider the birds "very rare."

The Bohemian waxwing, like the only other member of the family that ever visits us, the cedar-bird, is a roving gipsy. In Germany they say seven years must elapse between its visitations, which the superstitious old cronies are wont to associate with woful stories of pestilence--just such tales as are resurrected from the depths of morbid memories here when a comet reappears or the seven-year locust ascends from the ground.

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