Shrikes are small scale birds of prey

By Al Lowe
Contributor

Some day, you may have a rather unusual visitor near your birdfeeder. The instant this bird puts in an appearance, all of the small birds, the juncos and the chickadees will vanish into the underbrush. The newcomer is not there for birdseed, but for the birds themselves. The bird is a shrike.
There are two species of shrike which you may see here in Northern Ontario. And you will have to be very observant indeed to tell the two apart.
The Northern Shrike (Lanius excubitor) is about the size of a robin or a bit bigger. It has a generally grey look about it, with a prominent black mask through its eye. Wings are black with a white patch, and the tail is black with white borders. The beak is prominent, and heavily hooked. This shrike does not breed here, but in the far north. It migrates down this far and even further south, especially if the winter is a severe one. So you will see this shrike only in the winter. It is quite widespread in the northern hemisphere, being found all around the North Pole.
The other one is the Loggerhead Shrike (Lanius ludovicianus). It is somewhat smaller then the Northern. The eye mask is a bit more extensive, and the breast is barred with fairly light grey. Since you are not likely to ever see them together, you are not likely to get a chance to compare them anyway. This bird does not breed in our area, but winters far to the south, so you will never see it here in the winter. The Loggerhead is a purely North American bird, ranging from Alberta through here to Nova Scotia. Neither shrike is very common anywhere.
The shrikes are small scale birds of prey. They live entirely on animal material - insects, small mammals and small birds.
The old-fashioned name for these birds was ‘butcher-bird’, because of their habit of hanging their prey on thorns or barbed wire fences, just as the butchers used to do with meat carcasses in the old days.
Shrikes have strong beaks, but they have very weak feet. When a shrike captures something, it has to impale it so it can be held still while it is being eaten. The habit also serves as a storage method for future meals.
People sometimes get upset when they see a shrike eating another little bird, like a chickadee or a sparrow. But the main food of shrikes (more than 40 percent) consists of insects - grasshoppers, beetles and so on. And another large percentages is made up of various species of mice.
So, although we may hate to see the shrike kill one of the little birds we have been feeding all winter, remember that they are far more beneficial than harmful in the world of nature. Anyway, they are quite scarce in our area, so their impact on the bird population is very small.
So, for you people who are interested in birds of all kinds, if you see a shrike in the winter, it will be a Northern, and in the summer it will be a Loggerhead. These are two more of the rather curious birds of Northern Ontario.