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Updated: June 20, 2025
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.
Soon after arriving in these parts, thou wilt find that the species here enumerated are only as a handful from a well-stored granary. Nothing has been said of the eagles, the falcons, the hawks, and shrikes; nothing of the different species of vultures, the king of which is very handsome, and seems to be the only bird which claims regal honours from a surrounding tribe.
In regard to thrushes, shrikes, and woodpeckers, see Mr. Blyth, in Charlesworth's 'Mag. of Nat. Hist. vol. i. 1837, p. 304; also footnote to his translation of Cuvier's 'Regne Animal, p. 159. I give the case of Loxia on Mr. Blyth's information. On thrushes, see also Audubon, 'Ornith. Biog. vol. ii. p. 195.
If ever shrikes will learn to confine their attacks to English sparrows, we should offer them every encouragement. All winter long the ebony forms of crows vibrate back and forth across the cold sky.
As the morning advanced and the boys strode on nearing the pine woods, robins and bluebirds, shrikes and chewinks greeted them; and as they stopped for luncheon near a broad, open trail in the barren woodland a buzzard sailed above the tree-tops and peered at them curiously. In the meantime Norton, Hugh and Billy had started promptly twenty minutes after the departure of the machine.
As for nightingales, I never knew so many in the most secluded country. There are more round about London than in all the woodlands I used to ramble through. When people go into the country they really leave the birds behind them. It was the same, I found, after longer observation, with birds perhaps less widely known as with those universally recognised such, for instance, as shrikes.
Further along, a great blue heron was stalking about the edge of a marshy pool, and further still, in a woody swamp, stood three little blue herons, one of them in white plumage. In the drier and more open parts of the way cardinals, mocking-birds, and thrashers were singing, ground doves were cooing, quails were prophesying, and loggerhead shrikes sat, trim and silent, on the telegraph wire.
I know that real cannibals are people that eat other people. Do these birds eat people?" "They eat birds and other small animals," said Rap. "Don't you remember?" "Why, of course I do," said Dodo. "But if Shrikes eat birds, aren't they very bad Citizens?"
In the dentirostres, for instance, we have in a subdued form the hooked bill and predaceous character of the raptores; to this tribe belongs the family of the shrikes, so deadly to all the lesser field birds. In the genus bos, we have, in the sub-typical group, the bison, "wild, revengeful, and shewing an innate detestation of man."
I followed him, and, knowing his way well, Mercer took me by a short cut among the trees, which brought us just to the back of the keeper's cottage, where dozens of the supposed enemies of the game were gibbeted. Jays, hawks, owls, little falcons, shrikes, weasels, stoats, and polecats. "There," said Mercer, pointing, "look at that beautiful fresh jay. He might have let me "
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