Bridget Stutchbury, "Saving the Butcher Bird"

My first encounter with an Eastern Loggerhead Shrike brought tears to my eyes. As the expert invited to advise half a dozen biologists, I eagerly volunteered to hold the bird. Despite years of experience, the small bird’s strength took me by surprise and I briefly loosened my grip. Instantly the shrike’s beak had a vice grip on my soft flesh, leaving behind a nasty looking red “V” on the edge of my finger. While I gritted my teeth in an attempt to save face, a roar of laughter filled the room. My audience, staff from Wildlife Preservation Canada, had worked with shrikes for years and been on the receiving end of the raptor-like beak hundreds of times.

In spite of the insult and injury, I had to admire this feisty little bird. Its black mask, hooked bill, and ferocious attitude made me imagine that there were dozens of tattoos hidden somewhere under those feathers. The Eastern Loggerhead Shrike is a songbird also known as the “butcher bird,” because it catches small mammals, birds and insects and impales them on thorns before eating them. As tough as shrikes seem to be, this bird is the most vulnerable in Canada. Fewer than 30 pairs remain in the wild. 

There is something magical about holding a bird in the hand. It is an emotional, personal, and one-sided experience akin to giving a stranger a warm hug. The shrike fit comfortably in my hand and as I peered into the expressionless black eyes I could feel the rapid heartbeat, the sleek gray feathers, and the powerful wings as it wiggled to get free. I felt a sudden personal tie to this shrike, as it hit me that in a few decades this species could be gone forever.

That’s when I joined the butcher bird rescue team. We are biologists, naturalists, government staff, students, volunteers and even cattle ranchers who are taking drastic measures to save the Eastern Loggerhead Shrike from extinction. This daunting task has led me on a roller coaster ride of optimism, discouragement, pride and frustration. Captive pairs are bred in outdoor semi-natural enclosures in the same grassland and pasture habitat where wild shrikes breed. Captive shrikes are given months of intensive care that includes daily feedings, health check-ups of parents and young, and helping to teach offspring how to catch prey. Some years, we have released over one hundred young shrikes into the wild by the end of summer. 

The species is migratory and young shrikes, when only a month or two old, face a long journey over unknown and often dangerous terrain to wintering sites in the central or southern U.S. For two summers, we radio-tagged juveniles and searched for them daily, by car and plane. We were relieved to learn that most of our inexperienced birds survived their first weeks in the wild and, even more impressively, the first stage of migration through Toronto and southern Ontario. But we have little control over what happens to our birds when they are far from home. 

We were ecstatic when, in 2005, we discovered that one of our captive-reared juveniles had returned to Ontario to breed with a wild male. As she sat in the hawthorn tree, slowly cocking her long black tail and eyeing the ground carefully for food to deliver to her squawking nestlings, the only tell-tale sign of her history was the two leg bands we had given her a year earlier. Nearly two dozen young shrikes have followed suite and the shrike’s downward spiral has stopped, for now. But the wild population is not recovering as strongly as it needs to. Even with our herculean efforts, the probability of extinction in the next one hundred years is quite high. 

So why devote so much effort to saving a little-known species so close to the brink of extinction? This is not a cuddly panda, after all. And yet, there is something about this small, ruthless predator that inspires. The Eastern Loggerhead Shrike is tiny, fierce, and unique. Its sharp bite on my finger is a palpable reminder: even the humblest creatures are worth saving. 

Bridget Stutchbury is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Ecology and Conservation Biology at York University, Toronto. She is author of Silence of the Songbirds, which was a 2007 finalist for the Governor General’s Award in nonfiction, and The Bird Detective (April 2010).

Photo credit, Bridget Stutchbury: Douglas Morton

Photo credit, Butcher Bird: Larry Kirtley