Loggerhead Shrike

This Loggerhead Shrike dropped down next to me, then quickly departed.  I figured he was frightened by me as he came in for a landing and reversed in a nanosecond…not so.

After his two-point bounce landing, he was off again…too bad for me…but no.  

Quickly returning to my side with this prize catch, an unfortunate wasp, he showed it to me. 

After beating the life out of the wasp on the stone pillar, he dispatched the head and the remainder was dinner.

His slightly larger relative, the Northern Shrike, is more likely found in Wisconsin.  You can read about him in a previous Feather Tailed Story.  

(I reposted that story to December.) That Northern Shrike was in the Forest Beach Migratory Preserve, near Port Washington.

Sources refer to the two shrikes as ‘butcher birds’.  That was the name used when I was a child and first heard of the bird.  It's their popular name, not a scientific name, but the description fits these two shrikes.

  

I found this Loggerhead Shrike at Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge in southern New Mexico.

Allan