Mid-February can be a bleak time for birding, and for bird reporting, especially in a cold snowy winter like this one. Snowy Owls never showed this year, and the predicted irruption of winter finches, like crossbills and redpolls, didn’t materialize. Early spring migration feels a long ways off, and Ospreys are still at least a month away. There’s only so much you can stare at your feeders before you start to feel like Jack Nicholson in the Shining. Luckily for this bird reporter, this weekend brought a flurry of reports of one of my all-time favorite birds, one that I can easily talk about for, oh, let’s say 600 words. Ounce for ounce, it’s the fiercest avian predator on Cape Cod right now – it’s the “butcher bird”, the Northern Shrike.
Northern Shrikes are rare, robin-sized, gray-and-white, black-masked songbirds of the open boreal forests and up as far as the Arctic from northern Quebec to Northern Alaska. Like Snowy Owls they irrupt southwards after good breeding years, tracking small mammal population cycles, but are even less commonly seen than Snowies. Shrikes are fearsome predators, killing small mammals and birds, some larger than they are, with their hooked beaks. Imagine if that robin in your yard suddenly grabbed a chipmunk, or even a dove, violently killed it, and flew off with it, then factor in that shrikes are actually a bit smaller than robins, and you’ll get an idea of what they are capable of. All shrikes famously impale rodents, birds, and large insects on thorns and barbed wire fences to dismember and eat later, hence the “butcher bird” moniker, and will swallow the heads of their victims whole.
Northern Shrikes have always been uncommon in my lifetime – that last big irruption year was in 1978, but I missed out because I was four. One to three a winter is typical for the Cape, with even fewer expected on the islands. Ironically, during a big irruption year sometime around 1878, a warden was hired to shoot Northern Shrikes in Boston Common to keep them from eating the newly introduced House Sparrows, which of course are now considered a destructive invasive species while shrikes are a treasured rarity.
A reliable Northern Shrike has been at Crane Wildlife Management Area in Falmouth all winter - this state-managed matrix of grassland, treed savannah, and shrublands is perfect for an open country hunter like a shrike - but up to three others were suddenly turned up in different places by two birders on Saturday, which you may remember was Valentine’s Day. Both of these birders are married, but were out birding by themselves in remote corners of the Cape on Valentine’s Day – it’s a miracle any birder is still married.
One, and possibly two of these newly discovered shrikes were at the open grassy airport in Marstons Mills, another classic shrike spot with its expansive fields and low trees for perch hunting. The other was at Race Point, whose open, shrubby dunes have produced several over the years.
Northern Shrikes could turn up anywhere – I’ve seen them in the scrub oak barrens along the bluffs of Wellfleet but also sitting inconspicuously in treetops along wooded suburban roads, and even in downtown Wellfleet. But the most consistent shrike spots besides those already mentioned are High Head in Truro, Fort Hill in Eastham, and the big barrier beaches like Sandy Neck and Nauset. They look like a mockingbird in overall color, shape, and perching habits, but if the mockingbird had a neck like a defensive lineman and a dark mask. They are similar enough that, having fallen victim to the wishful thinking that often addles the birder brain, I have at least once called out a distant mockingbird as a shrike in front of a group of people.
While this read more like a particularly gory biography of Vlad the Impaler than an ornithological essay, I hope you have more respect for songbirds after learning a bit about shrikes. I bet now you won’t be turning your back on that robin in your yard anytime soon.
