XXI. THE SHRIKE’S LARDER.

Yes; there is no denying it—this is a shrike’s larder! The poor small beasts impaled here must have been hung upon thorns by that cruelest of executioners. The hoard belongs, I think, to a red-backed shrike, whom I have seen more than once flitting through the trees of this copse on the hillside; for the great grey shrike has gone long since—he comes to us only as a winter visitor in the hardest seasons—while woodchats and smaller grey shrike hardly occur at all in this out-of-the-way district. Indeed, the red-backed bird is the only true-born Briton of the entire family; he alone nests and rears his young here regularly. Butcher-birds, the gamekeepers call them, and well they deserve the title; for they catch and spit alive on the thorns of their larder all the bumble-bees and beetles, all the field-mice and robins they can swoop down upon and surprise from their bosky ambush. Cruel and ruthless birds, they seize whatever they can hold; but, instead of killing and eating their prey at once, they keep it deliberately alive as long as possible, on the stout thorn of a sloe-tree. Look at that poor shrew-mouse, for example, wriggling feebly on his stake, which the cunning bird has so managed to intertwine among the twigs as to make escape impossible; he must have been hanging there in torture for a week by his look, but the shrike will not eat him till the last possible moment, unless so minded. And that poor lizard, again, with his wonderful tenacity of life; he may have been impaled for a fortnight, yet the skin on his ribs still rises and falls with a faint breathing action. More merciful than nature, we will put him out of his pain; though, after all, what good have we done by it? The shrike will catch another to replace him.

We talk of beautiful instincts and beautiful adaptations, so I suppose we may also talk of hateful ones; and this instinct of the shrike’s is decidedly hateful. Yet such conduct is the rule in the world of animals: each species thinks only of its own comfort and pleasure; none takes the slightest heed of the pains of others. As Tennyson put it long ago—

“Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal;

The mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear’d by the shrike,

And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.”

Assuredly no creature is worse in this respect than our red-backed butcher-bird. Yet he is a handsome wretch, for all that, especially in his beautiful and delicate spring plumage, when he first returns to us from his African winter quarters—chestnut and reddish brown above, melting into dainty grey-blue about the head and neck, not unrelieved by bold patches of pure black and pure white on the tail and forehead. Moreover, strange to say, he is an accomplished musician. But there is an ugly look about him, none the less, for all his fine song and all his fine feathers. He has a cruel, falcon-like expression of face; and any one who has ever seen him engaged in calmly spiking a harvest-mouse or a frog on a thick spine of blackthorn, without the faintest regard to his helpless victim’s writhing, cannot fail to recognize the evil element in his eye, whenever he gives one the rare chance of viewing him.

Old-fashioned ornithologists used to think the shrikes were related to the birds of prey; and, indeed, they do somewhat resemble the smaller hawks in external features. But the likeness is purely superficial and adaptive—curved bill, strong talons, hard bristles on the beak, the keen eye of the hunter: it is the kind of similarity that must always exist among animals whose mode of life is closely similar. We know nowadays that structure depends upon habit, not habit upon structure. If you take to earning your living by rapine, you will acquire certain traits of strength and keenness inevitable in predatory forms; and that is why the shrikes, which are related by descent to the wrens and thrushes, have grown to resemble in external conformation the sparrowhawks and kestrels.

On the rare occasions when you do catch sight of a shrike, he is usually seated, half in ambush, on some perch in a tall hawthorn, or even openly on the telegraph-wires that cross a patch of likely hunting country. There he peers about and watches with his keen hazel eyes till mouse, frog, or lizard, bee, beetle, or dragon-fly, stirs in the meadow beneath him. Then, swift as thought, he swoops down upon his quarry from his invisible seat, not hovering and casting a telltale shadow like the hawk, but waiting his chance unseen under cover of the thicket. His favourite food, indeed, consists of bees and other soft-bodied insects; these he generally eats at once, returning forthwith to his perch and his peering. But if he catches any bigger prey, such as a frog, a field-mouse, a tomtit, or a partridge chick, he flies off with it to the larder, and there spears the wretched victim on a stout sharp spine, to devour it at his leisure. Even beetles and dragon-flies he will sometimes keep in stock, especially if his appetite is assuaged for the moment. Nevertheless, the butcher-bird is in the main an insect-eater; he is commonest on warm sandy soils, like that of these Surrey moors, where bumble-bees and cockchafers abound, and enable him to make an easy living. Indeed, all beasts and birds are mostly regulated in their distribution by the abundance or scarcity of their food or prey. Shrikes have, doubtless, no native objection to cold thick clay, as such; but bees being rare on moist soils, and field-mice or lizards still rarer, the shrike learns to avoid damp, chilly bottoms as herbivores avoid a dry desert country.