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MY Loggerhead Shrike
I noticed an unusual bird in my backyard. He had a big head and liked to sit about 20 feet above my garden. I admired his tolerant disposition, since he did not get upset at the bluejays, etc. that would try to drive him away.
I looked in a bird book at the library and found out that my bird was a Loggerhead Shrike, and what his diet, etc. was. So I left food for him to eat, and eventually he found it. By throwing him grubs, I eventually got him to come within about ten feet of me.
He and his mate had babies, which would come almost to my hand for food. The smallest baby seemed to be the least fearful.
After they got old enough my birds left the vicinity, so I no longer saw them.
But one day in my other garden, about a mile away, I noticed a loggerhead shrike which looked at me intently, as though he recognized me, so I offered him food. He surprised me by taking it without hesitation, so I concluded this was one of the baby shrikes that I had fed at my other garden, probably the smallest one.
Eventually I got this Shrike to land on my hand whenever I called him, even from 200 meters away. At certain times of the year however, he dared not cross into other birds territory.
He had many babies over the next three or four years, and I was able to get them to eat out of my hands too. The State Wildlife Department even made photgraphs and video of the bird eating out of my hand.
I was sad that my bird died last winter.
The Loggerhead Shrike is mentioned in the two old Newspaper articles copied below:
They call it the butcher bird.
Named for its gruesome habit of skewering prey in a trophylike array on sharp spikes and thorns around its territories, this keen-eyed hunting bird known as the shrike appears to be disappearing the world round. From the English heath to the Russian steppes to North America's grasslands, researchers are finding these birds to be in a precipitous decline.
Biologists say that what is happening to the shrike is symptomatic of the decline of grassland birds and the rapid disappearance of their flat, open habitat, which humans find perfect for development and farming.
But though grasslands are rapidly being converted, researchers say they suspect that there is more threatening shrikes than simple habitat loss, though they are not sure what it is. As researchers shuffle hypotheses that point the finger at everything from DDT to fire ants, the birds continue to disappear.
"Over all, the picture is pretty bleak," Bruce Peterjohn, coordinator of the breeding bird survey for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, said of North America's loggerhead shrike. "They're declining in all of their range. From the New England states they've pretty much disappeared."
According to Peterjohn, as of last year, this once common bird was listed as extinct in Maine and Pennsylvania, endangered in 11 states and threatened in two others. North America's loggerhead shrikes, as well as other grassland birds like Henslow's sparrows, eastern meadowlarks, field sparrows and dickcissels have been on a steady decline for all 25 years of the breeding bird survey. In 1992, survey volunteers conducted 2,500 25-mile-long counts at the peak of the breeding season, tallying all the birds they could see and hear.
But more worrisome is the likelihood that these birds have been on the decline much longer, perhaps since the beginning of the century. In addition to the loggerhead, the only other shrike found in the United States is the northern shrike, which breeds in the boreal forests of northern Canada and Alaska and whose status is little known. Peterjohn said grassland birds had shown a more persistent and drastic decline than any other group of birds.
Dr. Reuven Yosef, a shrike specialist working at the Archbold Biological Station in Lake Placid, Fla., said the situation was the same around the world for many of the 70 species in the shrike family.
"In Great Britain, at the turn of the century, according to their censuses, the red-backed shrike was as common as the blackbird," Yosef said. "But in 1989, the red-backed shrike was officially declared extinct in Britain. It's the same in Switzerland with the great gray shrike, with the lesser gray shrike across Europe. In Japan, the bull-headed shrike and brown shrike are in terrible trouble. The story goes on and on."
Because of the growing concern, Yosef and Tom Cade of the World Center for Birds of Prey in Boise, Idaho, organized the first International Shrike Symposium, which brought researchers from 20 countries to the Archbold Station in January.
The meeting confirmed fears that shrikes were doing poorly around the globe. But the world's shrike experts were unable to reach a consensus on what is behind the decline.
"It makes all of us fairly worried," said Dr. Carola Haas, a shrike biologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. "The fact that they seem to be declining in all of North America is disturbing, and the fact that they seem to be declining worldwide raises the question of whether something special is happening to shrikes. No one really has a good idea why this is happening, and people are really now just grasping at straws."
These robin-size birds, which are most easily seen sitting atop fence posts, or snags, hunt by surveying the ground for a skittering grasshopper or even a small mouse or frog. Once fixed on their target, these hawklike predators swoop down and, lacking the talons of their counterparts, kill their prey with a swift and powerful blow of their head.
Also known to take other birds, shrikes carry out their deadly work entirely in flight. Researchers say that like the hawks they so resemble, these predators might be vulnerable to poisons that their prey or their prey's prey ingest.
"Being the top of the food chain and having an exclusively carnivorous predatory diet," Yosef said, "they accumulate all the negative things that we put into nature, fertilizers, PCBs, even benign things that we aren't aware could negatively affect the habitat."
2nd story:
Shopping centers, industrial parks and superhighways are great for the economy, but not so good for migratory birds whose numbers have dropped 60 percent in South Carolina during the past two decades.
``If we want to convert the state into shopping malls and highways, you're not going to have birds, or very few of them,'' said John Cely, wildlife biologist with the state Natural Resources Department.
He said exotic birds that fly north to South Carolina for the summer, such as orchard orioles, wood thrushes, prairie warblers, yellow-breasted chats and hooded warblers, are disappearing at rates of up to 4 percent a year.
It's the same for birds that winter in South Carolina and fly north for the summer.
There are two main reasons for the decline, said Sid Gauthreaux, a Clemson University biologist.
Climate changes mean tail winds are less favorable for birds migrating north in spring. The birds are weaker when they arrive and have fewer offspring.
In addition, hardwood forests that provide the best habitat are being lost to development or replaced by young pine plantations that lack the shrubs, budding trees and berry bushes birds need.
One way to attract migratory birds to your yard is lock up your lawn mower.
``You can't have it too manicured -- just reclaim the natural landscape that attracts birds,'' Gauthreaux said.
Birch and other deciduous trees, along with shrubs and berry bushes, also help attract migrating birds.
``Migrant birds like to feed on new leaves and the insects attracted by these leaves,'' he said.
While birds are disappearing from developed areas statewide, they seem to be holding their own in the mountain forests, said Drew Lanham, assistant professor of forest resources at Clemson.
Development is also reducing populations of native birds such as bob white quail and loggerhead shrikes.
They used to thrive in brushy fields and hedgerows when South Carolina was primarily a rural state. But during the past 50 years, many farms have disappeared, and the birds with them, Cely said
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