In the Southern and Middle States, where the smaller loggerhead shrike is most common, some children say he looks like a mockingbird; but the feathers on his back are surely quite a different gray, a light-bluish ash, and pearly on his under parts, with white in his black wings and tail which is conspicuous as he flies. His powerful head, which is large for his size, has a heavy black line running from the end of his mouth across his cheek, and his strong bill has a hook on the end which is useful in tearing the {80} flesh from his victim's bones. He really looks like nothing but just what he is--a butcher-bird. See him, quiet and preoccupied, perched on a telegraph pole on the lookout for a dinner! A kingbird, or other flycatcher which chooses similar perches, would sail off suddenly into the air if a winged insect hove in sight, snap it up, make an aerial loop in its flight and return to its old place. Not so the solitary, sanguinary shrike. When his wonderfully keen eyes detect a grasshopper, a cricket, a big beetle, a lizard, a little mouse, or a sparrow at a distance in a field, he drops like an eagle upon the victim, seizes it with his strong beak, and flies with steady flapping strokes of the wings, close along the ground, straight to the nearest honey locust or spiny thorn; then rises with a sudden upward turn into the tree to impale his prey. Hawks, who use the same method of procuring food, have very strong feet; their talons are of great help in holding and killing their victims; but the shrikes, which have rather weak, sparrow-like feet, for perching only, are really compelled in many cases to make use of stout thorns or sharp twigs to help them quiet the struggles of their victims. Weather-vanes, lightning rods, bare branches, or the outermost or top branches of tall trees, high poles, and telegraph wires, which afford a fine bird's eye-view of the surrounding hunting ground, are favourite points {81} of vantage for both shrikes. When it is time to husk the corn, every farmer's boy must have seen a shrike sitting on a fence-rail or hovering in the air ready to seize the little meadow mice that escape from the shocks.