by Grant Allen
Nevertheless, when we come across one page in this vast mute tragedy of sentient life among the calm surroundings of a quiet wood, it always surprises us afresh; and that is why I have chosen as a good illustrative case of this phase in nature my wicked old friend the shrike, or butcher-bird.
Externally, I do not know that there is anything about his personal appearance which might lead you to suppose he was much wickeder or fiercer than the remainder of his family. In costume and colouring he is quiet and demure, not to say almost quakerish. To be sure, there is a lurking gleam in the corner of his eye, when you get a close view of him, which betokens a crafty and cruel disposition; while something about the peculiar curl at the tip of his beak seems to suggest a lordly indifference to suffering in others. But on the whole he is a hypocrite in his outer dress; you would hardly suspect him at first sight of the high crimes and misdemeanours of which I admit him to be really guilty. Still, you do not know a thrush till you have seen him eat worms alive slowly, a mouthful at a time, pulling them out of their holes and chewing them gradually as he goes; and you do not know a butcher-bird till you have lighted upon him at home in his woodland haunts, with his living and writhing larder collected all round him.
In size, the butcher-bird (No. 1) is about as large as a lark; but he is a stouter and handsomer bird, especially in his fresh spring plumage, when he goes a-courting, and wins his soberer bride by the beauty of his coat and the gallantry of his bearing. His colouring is fine, but somewhat difficult to describe, his recognised specific name of “the red-backed shrike” being perhaps too strong for his actual hues. Chestnut, shading into reddish brown above, would be a more accurate mode of stating the facts; but he is pinky-white below, and has dashes of blue, of grey, of pure white, and of black scattered about in various parts of his plumage. A bright black bill and a dark hazel eye add beauty to his sharp and vigorous countenance. Alertness, indeed, is the keynote of his character.
As in most dominant races, his lady differs much from him. She is duller and darker, and lacks the occasional white patches that adorn her lord. But she shares his general air of keen life and his rapidity of movement, being in every respect a helpmeet for him.
Mr. Enock has represented her in No. 2 in a characteristic attitude, perched on a small twig of hawthorn, and ready to pounce down upon a luckless fly, whose movements she is watching with interested attention.
I say hawthorn on purpose, for the peculiarity of the butcher-bird is that in England or abroad it haunts for the most part thorn-bearing bushes. With us, it is but a summer migrant, occurring pretty frequently in the southern counties; but its winter home is on the Upper Nile and in East and South Africa, where it can find in abundance the thorny shrubs of the desert ranges, which stand it in good stead as pegs or hooks on which to base its larder. In England, it usually selects a hawthorn for its scene of operations.
No. 3 shows far better than I can describe it the nature of these food-stores, where the butcher-bird lays by meat for himself, his mate, and his unfledged young. The larder is always situated in the neighbourhood of the nest, and the male bird hunts for flies, bees, and other insects, while the female sits on the eggs hard by. He eats a few at once, to allay his hunger, spitting them first as a means of holding them; but the greater number he preserves alive upon the cruel thorns for the use of his mate and his callow nestlings. “Les pères de famille,” said Talleyrand, “sont capables de tout.” And we may well exclaim, “Oh, parental affection, what crimes are perpetrated in thy name!”
The particular portion of the larder which Mr. Enock has selected for representation contains a bumble-bee, two large flies, and a nestling hedge-sparrow, stolen from its mother; for the butcher-bird does not wholly confine himself to a diet of insects; he is cannibal enough to catch and eat other birds, not to mention mice and such small mammals. So fierce and savage is he when on the hunt after provender, that he will even spear and impale larger birds than himself, such as blackbirds and thrushes. Not content with hanging them on the thorns alive, he will fasten down their legs and wings by an ingenious cross arrangement of twigs and branches, so as to prevent them from escaping; for he does not so much desire to kill his prey, as to keep it alive till he is ready to eat it or to distribute it to his family. He knows that dead birds soon decay; and he doesn’t like his game high: but he also knows that wounded birds will live on and keep quite fresh for days together; so he is careful to disable without actually killing the creatures he captures.
Among the animals I have seen in butcher-birds’ larders I may mention mice, shrews, lizards, robins, tomtits, and sparrows; among the smaller birds he especially affects willow-wrens and chiff-chaffs: but keepers tell me that they have even found them seizing and spitting young partridges and pheasants. Whether this is true or not I cannot say; but the game-preserving interest certainly looks upon shrikes with no friendly eye, and you may sometimes see one hung up on a nail among the jays and hawks and stoats and weasels on the “keeper’s trees,” where the guardians of the wood display the corpses or skins of evil-doers as a terror to their like, much as mediæval kings displayed the heads of traitors above the gates of the city.
Oddly enough, however, these “keeper’s trees” themselves are favourite haunts and hawking-pitches of the butcher-bird, who is so little deterred by the supposed lesson that he uses them as convenient places for catching insects. For, in spite of his occasional carnivorous tastes, your shrike is at heart, and in essence, an insect-eater. He adds a mouse or a tit as an exceptional luxury. Now, he knows that the owls and stoats hung up on the keeper’s rustic museum attract numbers of carrion flies, and he therefore perches calmly on the boughs above the mouldering remains of his own slaughtered brother to await the insects that come to devour him. Then he darts upon them with something of the fly-catcher’s eagerness, eating them up at once, or flying off with them alive to impale in his store-house.
In No. 4 we see the female butcher-bird, on her return from a successful chase after prey of greater importance. She has caught a harvest-mouse, the tiniest and prettiest of our English mammals, and though without a license to hang game, has threaded it through the neck on a branch of hawthorn, as a preliminary to eating it. This enables her to hold it conveniently as on a fork or skewer while she pecks at it. Sometimes you will find the mice fastened through the body, and gnawing the twig with their teeth in their prolonged agony. But the butcher-bird takes no notice of their writhings and their groans: she treats them with the indifference of a fishmonger to lobsters. It is her business to provide for her own young, and she does it as ruthlessly as if she were a civilised human being.
The shrike’s ordinary method of capturing prey closely resembles that of the fly-catcher, to which, however, it is not really related. The resemblance is merely one of those due to similarity of habit. Every well-conducted butcher-bird has a settled perch or pitch on which he sits to watch and wait, and to which he returns after each short excursion. Flies and bees he catches on the wing, darting down upon them suddenly with a swoop like a kingfisher’s; but he also often takes them sitting, especially when they are settled on a leaf or branch, or are eating carrion. One of his most favourite hunting-boxes is a telegraph wire, and he prefers one that crosses the corner of a wood; there he will sit with his head held sapiently on one side, keeping a sharp look-out from his beady brown eyes in every direction. If a bee lights on a head of clover, if a cockchafer stirs, if a mouse moves in the grass, if a fledgeling thrush makes a first unguarded attempt to fly — woe betide the poor innocent; our butcher-bird is upon him, with a fierce darting beak, and in ten seconds more, his writhing body adds to the store in the shrike’s larder.
A good place and time to watch a butcher-bird at work is in a quiet field by a copse just after the mowing. But you must hide carefully. The short grass is then full of beetles, crickets, and grasshoppers, as well as of mice, shrews, and lizards, who can conceal themselves less easily than they were wont to do in the long hay before t
he cutting. At such times, hawks and owls make a fine livelihood in the fields; but their habit is to hunt their quarry on the open. They hover and drop upon it. That is not the butcher-bird’s plan; he is a more cautious and secret foe; he sits casually on his branch or his telegraph wire, with his head on one side, till his prey stirs visibly; then he pounces on him from above, making a short excursion each time, and returning to rest on his accustomed position. When he catches a bird, and eats it at once, he begins by spitting it on a thorn: then he attacks the skull first, breaking it through and eating the brain, which is his favourite tit-bit. He also makes raids on the nests of other birds, and carries off the nestlings.
If you open the crop of a butcher-bird, the contents will show you that, in England at least, its main articles of diet consist of bees and flies, but especially of beetles. It is full of their hard wing-cases. Now, ornithologists have long noticed that the distribution of butcher-birds in the land is very capricious; in one district they will be fairly numerous (though, at best, they are rare birds), and in another, close by, they will be very uncommon or quite unknown. It is probable that this relative frequency or scarcity depends upon the distribution of their proper food-insects. Indeed, just as we all know that an “army fights upon its stomach,” so we are beginning to know now that commissariat lies at the bottom of most problems of animal life. I used to wonder on the Riviera why trap-door spiders, with their long tubular nests, were abundant in certain deep red clay-banks, but wholly wanting in others, just as sunny, just as soft, just as easy to tunnel; till one day it struck me that the spiderless banks were exposed now and then to the cold wind, the mistral, and hence were naturally almost flyless. As a matter of course, the spiders went where the flies were to be found; and these open banks, though sunny and warm, were from the spider’s point of view mere Klondykes or Saharas.
It is just the same with the butcher-birds. Beetles and bees frequent for the most part warm, crumbling soils; they are infrequent on damp clays and chilly, marshy places. Sandstone and chalk attract them; on London clay or the damp flats of the Weald they are few and far between. Hence, where the beetles are, there will the shrikes be gathered together. They abound (comparatively) in warm sandstone hills, but are almost unknown in chilly clay districts. Not that they mind the cold as such; it is the question of food that really affects them. So, too, with the swallows and other long-winged insect-hawkers. The swift flies very high, and lives on summer insects, which come out in July and August only; so he arrives here late, and goes away again sometimes as early as the date of grouse-shooting. The house-martin, on the other hand, subsists on low-flying midges which surround houses; he therefore comes first of all his group, and goes away latest. The night-jar flits over fern-clad or heather-clad moors, and feeds almost entirely on certain night-flying beetles and moths; hence he arrives when they hatch out from the cocoon, and flaps southward again on his big, overlapping wings as soon as they have disappeared or been mostly eaten. It is all a question of commissariat. Our early English kings had manors of their own in many parts of the country, in all of which supplies were laid up throughout the year for the royal table; in due time, the king arrived with all his court, stopped a month or six weeks, ate up all that was provided for him, and then rode on with his hungry horde to the next royal manor. It is just the same with the birds; they come and go as supplies are assured them. The shrike stops in England while bees and beetles last; when provender fails, he is off on his own strong wings to Rhodesia.
No. 5 introduces us to another strange scene in the eternal epic of prey and slaughter. It shows us how beetle proposes, but shrike disposes. Here, parental feeling wars against parental feeling. A busy group of burying-beetles have lighted upon a dead field-mouse — itself hawked at, perhaps, and wounded by “a mousing owl,” but not quite killed at the time, and now abandoned on the open. The burying-beetles, all agog, proceed to cover it with a layer of earth — not, indeed, out of such instinctive piety as that which induced the robin-redbreast and the wren in the story to cover the Babes in the Wood with mouldering leaves, but for a much more prosaic and practical, though none the less praiseworthy, motive. They want to lay their eggs in it, so that the maggots may have plenty to eat when they hatch out — for these burying-beetles are carrion-feeders, whose larvæ thrive on dead and decaying animals; and they desire to bury the corpse in order to keep it intact for their own brood, without interference on the part of other and more powerful carrion-eaters. When successful, they cover the mouse entirely with mould, and thus leave their young supplied with a liberal diet.
But hidden among the greenery of a tree overhead, a cynical butcher-bird is calmly watching those insect sextons from the corner of his eye. As soon as enough of them have collected on the spot, he will swoop down upon their bodies unseen from above, and will carry them off to spike them on his own pet thorns for the benefit of his struggling young family. Thus does parental affection war unconsciously against parental affection. Each kind fights only for its own hand, and regards only the young of its own species. For as Tennyson says well in “Maud”: —
“Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal;
The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow speared by the shrike,
And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.”
No. 6 shows us one member of the butcher-bird’s young family, just hatched and fledged, in his streaky grey plumage, and beginning to go out upon the world for himself. He is trying to catch an insect on a thorn above him. It also suggests to us the appropriate moral that if you train up a butcher-bird in the way he should go, when he is old he will not depart from it. Lessons of cruelty are here imbibed — I cannot truthfully say, “with his mother’s milk,” but at least from his father’s and mother’s example. While the mother-bird sits upon her nest (as you see her in No. 7), the little chicks are fed “by hand,” so to speak, with captured insects. But as soon as they can fly a little, they come out and perch upon the twigs of the larder, that they may learn fly-catching by helping themselves to insects spitted on the thorns, where parental affection, however misguided, has placed them for that purpose. Thus they imbibe a taste for living food from their earliest moments. As Prior long ago put it: —
“Was ever Tartar fierce and cruel
Upon the strength of water-gruel?
But how restrain his rage and force
When first he kills, then eats, his horse?”
What the butcher-bird requires in his place of residence, then, is, above all things, easy access to warm sandstone or limestone tracts, with plenty of insects, lizards, mice, and small birds; he also needs an open common to hunt over, bushes and trees on which to perch at watch, and clumps of thorn-bearing shrubs to provide him with a larder. There he builds his rude nest, one of the roughest and most inartistic I know; and there the mother brings up her young in her own wicked fashion. But though a rather shy bird, the shrike does not wholly fear or shun civilisation; for the rich insect population of our garden often attracts the wicked pair; and in July and August, when flies are rife among the fruit-trees, they will bring their young brood into the currant and gooseberry beds, and teach the young idea how to shoot in the manner proper to so carnivorous a species.
As a matter of evolution, the shrike’s position is a very interesting one. For he is not exactly a bird of prey — certainly he does not belong to the hawk and eagle order. His near relations are all mere insect-eating birds; but he has gone a little beyond them in his carnivorous habits, by adding mice, birds, and lizards to his diet. His great discovery, however, is his cruel device of using thorns for his larder; this ingenious but hateful invention it is which has secured him a place in the struggle for existence. It is curious to note, too, how the habit has reacted on the bird’s structure and appearance. He has acquired the quick eye and nervous alertness of a bird of prey, and has even grown like that higher group to some small extent in his beak and talons. He is a wonderfully pluck
y little fighter, too, both against his own kind and against other species.
Have you ever reflected how wonderfully varied and eventful is the life of such a migratory bird as this cruel butcher? We human beings, who can only travel south in one of the crawling expresses misnamed trains-de-luxe, have little conception of the freedom and variety which every mere shrike can claim as its birthright. Let us follow one out briefly through its marvellous life-cycle.
It is hatched from a creamy-coloured and dappled egg in a nest in England. From four to six brothers or sisters occupy the home, and, indeed, to be strictly accurate, more than fill it. Everybody knows the old conundrum, “Why do birds in their little nests agree?” with its quaintly sensible answer, “Because, if they didn’t, they would fall out.” Well, with the butcher-birds, that remark is literally accurate. The nest is a ragged and rickety structure, hardly big enough to hold the young as soon as they are fledged. It is built in the boughs of a thorn bush, and near it stands the well-stocked parental larder. The young butcher-bird, as soon as he can fly, is taught to eat insects from the family hoard, and later on to pick them up for himself on the wing in the open. He is usually hatched about the beginning of June; by the middle of July, his mamma and papa take him on the insect hunt into neighbouring gardens. In his early plumage, he takes after his mamma, but already shows some signs of the white tips and black markings which will distinguish him as a male bird in his adult existence.
