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Updated: May 3, 2025
Sitting on the felled ash under the shade of the hawthorn hedge, where the butcher-birds every year used to stick the humble-bees on the thorns, he described the route a mere waggon track and the situation of the largest copses.
Whenever a wagtail dares to come to this sand the robin immediately appears and drives him away. He will bear no intrusion. A pair of butcher-birds built very near this spot one spring, but afterwards appeared to remove to a place where there is more furze, but beside the same hedge. The determination and fierce resolution of the shrike, or butcherbird, despite his small size, is most marked.
Even as things are, however, the cold season is sure to bring us a few butcher-birds. These come on business, and are now welcomed as public benefactors, though formerly our sparrow-loving municipal authorities thought it their duty to shoot them. They travel singly, as a rule, and sometimes the same bird will be here for several weeks together.
This species may be said to be the warbler of the Western Himalayas, and, as such, it has been made the subject of a separate essay. The butcher-birds are the best-known members of this fraternity. Undoubtedly passerine in structure, shrikes are as indubitably raptores by nature. They are nothing less than pocket hawks.
Davison remarks that it is "very fond of working its way up to some conspicuous post to the top of one of the long flower-stalks of Lobelia excelsa, for instance where it will halt for a minute or two, and then, after making a feeble attempt at a song, will dive suddenly in the brushwood and disappear." Shrikes or butcher-birds are hawks in miniature, as regards habits if not in structure.
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.
Hard work, Joe thought, was n't necessary on a selection. Casey knew a thing or two so he said. One fine morning, when all the sky was blue and the butcher-birds whistling strong, Dwyer's cows smashed down a lot of the fence and dragged it into the corn. Casey, assisted by Joe, put them all in the yard, and hammered them with sticks. Dwyer came along. "Those cattle belong to me," he said angrily.
It has no white in the wings and tail, and its rump is red instead of being white. Butcher-birds are of striking rather than beautiful appearance. They have some very handsome relatives which are known as minivets.
Probably they guess by his violent words and actions that he is a victim of the Euloowayi. If so, they are careful not to answer him; were they to do so he would drop dead. Any way, he will die that night. When the magpies and butcher-birds sing much it is a sign the Euloowayi are about. Gineet Gineet, so called from his cry, is the bogy that black children dread.
She picked up the cabbage leaf with the fruit and flung them over the railings into a flower bed, where the butcher-birds and the bower-birds quarrelled over them, and the big, grey bird in the gum tree on the other side of the fence cachinnated in derisive chorus to Bridget's burst of hysterical laughter. A little later Maggie came out from the bedroom with some letters in her hand.
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