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............