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"The power that heals wounds also inflicts them: that clothes the dungheap with sweet growths and grasses, breaks, too, into fire and earthquake; that causes the partridge to die for her young, also makes the shrike with his living larder."
The shrike had greatly annoyed him; it had been hanging about for some time, he told me, dashing at the linnets and driving them off when they flew down to the nets. Two or three times he might have caught it, but would not draw the nets and have the trouble of resetting them for so worthless a bird. "But I'll take him the next time," he said vindictively.
The solitary white-rumped shrike is occasionally met with in late summer. Owls are common but what species other than the western horned owl I do not know. Other rather rare birds are the beautiful lazuli bunting and the western warbling vireo. Among the wood-peckers I have also noted the bristle-bellied wood-pecker, or Lewis's wood-pecker, Harris's wood-pecker, and the downy wood-pecker.
Birds, as the Drongo shrike, and a bird very like the grey linnet, with a thick reddish bill, assemble in very large flocks now that it is winter, and continue thus till November, or period of the rains. A very minute bee goes into the common small holes in wormeaten wood to make a comb and lay its eggs, with a supply of honey. There are seven or eight honey-bees of small size in this country.
Fortunately the shrike is rare with us; one seldom finds his nest, with poor Chickadee impaled on a sharp thorn near by, surrounded by a varied lot of ugly beetles.
One afternoon I heard a peculiar note, at first like the "cheepy-teet-teet" of the Pine Grosbeak, only louder and more broken, changing to the jingling of Blackbirds in spring, mixed with some Bluejay "jay-jays," and a Robin-like whistle; then I saw that it came from a Northern Shrike on the bushes just ahead of us.
If ever anybody in the Great World felt relief and thankfulness, it was Whitefoot when he dodged into that hole in the dead tree just as Butcher the Shrike all but caught him. For a few minutes he did nothing but pant, for he was quite out of breath. "I was right," he said over and over to himself, "I was right. I was sure there must be a hole in this tree.
One may walk a whole day and not see more than two or three species of either. In birds there is the same difference. In most parts of tropical America we may always find some species of woodpecker tanager, bush shrike, chatterer, trogon, toucan, cuckoo, and tyrant-flycatcher; and a few days' active search will produce more variety than can be here met with in as many months.
His days, as the poet says, are "bound each to each by natural piety." Happy lot! wherein duty and conscience go ever hand in hand; for whose possessor "Love is an unerring light, And joy its own security." In appearance the shrike resembles the mocking-bird. Indeed, a policeman whom I found staring at one would have it that he was a mocking-bird. "Don't you see he is? And he's been singing, too."
One of the Blackie youngsters, stump-tailed, frog-mouthed, blundering, foolish, gawky, and squawking, landed, all of a heap, right into the very middle of the picnic-party. Mrs. Blackie very nearly had a fit on the spot, and the shrike judged that the time had about arrived for her to quit that vicinity. Blackie himself, to do him justice, kept cool enough to do nothing.
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