On these lines, therefore, I proceeded to study my shrikes. What I discovered by watching early and late, by peeping at them before breakfast and spying upon them after supper,--what they eat and drink, how they behave to one another and their neighbors, what they have to say or to sing, in fact, their whole story so far as it was revealed to me,--I shall set down, nothing extenuating. Other observers may have seen very different things, but that only proves what I am constantly asserting: that birds are individuals; that because one shrike does a certain thing is no sign that another will do the same; it is not safe to judge the species _en masse_. This, therefore, is the true chronicle of what I saw of one pair of loggerhead shrikes (_Lanius ludovicianus_), in the northern extremity of Vermont, about the first of July, 1894. The discovery of the nest in the thorn-tree was not my own. A friend and fellow bird-lover, driving one evening up this road, startled a bird from the nest, and, checking her horse, looked on in amazement while, one after another, six full-grown shrikes emerged from the tree and flew away. Pondering this strange circumstance she drove on, and when returning looked sharply out for the thorn-tree. This time one bird flew from the nest, which seemed to settle the question of ownership. The next day and the next this experience was repeated, and then the news was brought to me in the woods. [Sidenote: _A LONELY ROAD._] It was a lonely road, leading to nothing except a pasture and a distant farm or two, and the presence of a member of the human race was almost as rare as it was in the forest itself. On one side stretched a pasture with high rail fence; on the other, a meadow guarded by barbed wire. A traveler over this uninviting way soon left the last house in the village behind, and then the only human dwellings in sight were some deserted farm buildings on a hill a mile or more away. Not a tree offered grateful shade, and not a bush relieved the bare monotony of this No Thoroughfare.