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The most probable explanation of the singular and apparently cruel habit of the butcher-bird is, that it merely places its victims upon the thorns, in order to keep them safe from ground-ants, rats, mice, raccoons, foxes, and other preying creatures just as a good cook would hang up her meat or game in the larder to prevent the cats from carrying it off.
It is among mammals what the butcher-bird is among the feathered tribes an assassin, a beautiful fiend. It would seem that nature reproduces among animals and plants every phase of human character. Was it Nero or Caligula who said, 'Oh, that Rome had but one neck, that I might sever it? Such is the spirit that animates the ermine.
In the month of March, the chrysalides burst through the skin, and drop on the ground, when they may be seen crawling in immense numbers along the deer paths as they pass from west to east. The only birds observed in winter are grouse, ptarmigan, a small species of wood-pecker, butcher-bird, and the diminutive tomtit.
Only when leaves fall and the light is low and slant, one sees the long clean flanks of the jackrabbits, leaping like small deer, and of late afternoons little cotton-tails scamper in the runways. But the most one sees of the burrowers, gophers, and mice is the fresh earthwork of their newly opened doors, or the pitiful small shreds the butcher-bird hangs on spiny shrubs.
He has no shelter if the storm descends suddenly; he has no dome of twisted straw well thatched and tiled to retreat to. The butcher-bird, with a beak like a crooked iron nail, drives him to the ground, and leaves him pierced with a thorn; but no hail of shot revenges his tortures. No one cares for the humble-bee.
He is branded everywhere as the "butcher-bird," and it seems to be the aim of each writer to discover in his conduct something a little more sanguinary, a shade more depraved, than any predecessor has done.
They must be my beautiful, graceful, attractive strangers must be butcher-birds! Dreadful discovery! I must at once know all about them; whether they deserve the name and the reputation. I flew to my books. "The character of the butcher-bird," says Wilson, "is entitled to no common degree of respect.
But the other day a butcher-bird made us a flying call, and almost the first thing he did was to catch one of these same furry dainties and spit it upon a thorn, where anon I found him devouring it.
And though the story be not so sensational, is it not better to clear up than to blacken the reputation of a fellow-creature, even a very small one in feathers? This thing it had long been in my heart to do, to see with my own eyes what enormities the beautiful butcher-bird is guilty of.
When a sparrow chases a butcher-bird we cheer the sparrow, and then when a humming-bird puts to flight a sparrow, we cheer the humming-bird; we side with the kingbird against the crow, and with the vireo, against the kingbird. It is a noble trait of human nature though we are somewhat too ready to boast of it that we like, as we say, to see the little fellow at the top.
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