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Updated: June 3, 2025
The varieties to be seen here include the South American pikas and shrikes, with their gay plumage. These shrikes better known as butcher-birds are so called from the cruelty with which they treat their prey.
The woods and thickets are also ranged by jays, cuckoos, owls, hawks, magpies, butcher-birds Nature's gamekeepers, with a licence to kill, which, after the manner of game-keepers, they exercise somewhat indiscriminately. Above the earth, the air is peopled by swifts and swallows in the daytime, and by goatsuckers at night.
My people are angry. There are butcher-birds among them. They hate you they hate the cabin of the white man. The white men take away their room, overthrow their forests, kill their deer. There is danger in the air. "The October moon will come. It will grow. It will turn into a sun on the border of the night. Then come Potlatch. My people ask for the Dance of the Evil One.
The note of the cuckoo sounds above the rushing of the train, and the larks may be seen, if not heard, rising high over the wheat. Some birds, indeed, find the bushes by the railway the quietest place in which to build their nests. Butcher-birds or shrikes are frequently found on the telegraph wires; from that elevation they pounce down on their prey, and return again to the wire.
The eggs of the nighthawk are sometimes found at this season near by. They are laid on the ground, on the barest spots, where there is no herbage. At dusk, the nighthawk wheels with a soft yet quick flight over the ferns and about the trees. Along the hedges bounding the heath butcher-birds watch for their prey sometimes on the furze, sometimes on a branch of ash.
They are called after their colours, as the speckled manakin, the white-capped South American manakin, the purple-breasted, variegated, purple-throated, and rock manakins. Next to the manakins, are the Indian, African, and American caterpillar eaters; the Malabar and African shrikes; and in the two last cases of the tooth-beaked group, are placed the true butcher-birds and bush shrikes.
This epithet, "fascinating," in turn fascinated me; and I thought that my prose was, like some serpent, about to fascinate all the butcher-birds and ducks of the democratic marsh. A year passed away; these fine friendships cooled: 't is the fate of these factitious tendernesses.
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