We have a Loggerhead Shrike (aka the butcher bird) with fledgelings. They have found our Agave Cactus. On the tips of the cactus were three lizards, two sparrows (one with its head ripped off and it's spinal column sticking up), and assorted body parts. Flies everywhere.

Damn gross.



[This message has been edited by aggiedent (edited 6/15/2011 3:56p).]

Post pics

Sweet!

awesome birds! but they hurt like hell when they bite.

pics!

Pics or GTFO!

Love loggerheads, they are awesome birds.

[This message has been edited by YellowPot_97 (edited 6/15/2011 2:12p).]

I did take some pics with my SLR yesterday but don't have the card at work to download. Sadly, when I saw the sparrow with the spinal column sticking up, I didn't take a pic right away. By the time I got back it was a wing and some guts.

I did shoot a pic of an anole. They had impaled him with the tip sticking right out of his mouth.

Looking forward to seeing these pics

found this on google, looking forward to the real pics

PICS!!!


(nature is so freaking cool)

Trust me Aggiedent, you don't want to promise this buch pictures and then fail to deliver.


They never let you live it down. Good thing you already have the pics.

awesome...

[This message has been edited by agrams (edited 6/15/2011 12:46p).]

That's really cool! Never heard of that before. Why do they do that? To warn other critters to stay away?

they eat what they kill. saving their food for later and marking their territory.

Ok, I googled it. They do that to kill the prey due to lack of talons. Interesting. I'm still wondering how they pull off impailing another critter that isnt dead yet.

quote:

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A small gray, black, and white bird of open areas, the Loggerhead Shrike hardly appears to be a predator. But it uses its hooked beak to kill insects, lizards, mice, and birds, and then impales them on thorns to hold them while it rips them apart.

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Found some pics I took of the aftermath of a Shrike attack......









[This message has been edited by YellowPot_97 (edited 6/15/2011 2:12p).]

Awesome!

Awesomest bird I've never heard of!

The Honey Badger of the bird world!!!

I always wondered what those were called. We used to see them impaling critters on barbed wire, and osage orange thorns...

quote:

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Awesomest bird I've never heard of!

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+1. I had no idea these things existed until this thread. Thanks, TexAgs.

agrams ...

Loggerhead don't care!

quote:

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Awesomest bird I've never heard of!


+1. I had no idea these things existed until this thread. Thanks, TexAgs.

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+2

and was I the only one that thought this was another Fishing Fools thread from the title

Loggerhead to Yellowpot: "You're next up on the menu if I escape your damn dirty ape hands."

a-ha, that's what that was. i saw one recently, and thought it was some sort of jay or cat-bird family member.

Nature is awesome. Everything out there has a story. You just have to do a little research to see what their story is. Sometimes that research consists of just sitting in the woods & observing what's going on. Admittedly, some stories are cooler than some of the others & shrikes are one of the cooler stories. I am very fortunate to have a job that has me in active contact with nature every single day & every single day Mother Nature shows me something new that I had never known before.

Mrs Jock says that I can't have one as a pet. Hater.

I'd hate to run across a honey badger in the wild!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBrwLn1_e4I

If you ever watched the old POW escape movie, "The Great Escape" there was a scene where a lecture was delivered on shrikes. For some reeason I always remember that.

I have been fascinated with butcher birds since childhood. We had a big locust thicket in a pasture where I would ride my three wheeler and it was always riddled with carnage.

I can honestly say this was one of the main things to stick out for me in ornithology. I was unappologetically a mammals guy at the time (still not remotely a bird guy). But I knew this behavior and bird.