I was thinking. Maybe I should see if some shrikes wanted to move into the neighborhood.
Feathered Terror: The Strange World of the Shrike:
The hunter spots his prey. He quickly swoops down and slams his victim to the ground. Battering it into submission with repeated blows to its neck, he picks it up and . . . impales it upon a spike?
Such violence seems more suited to a mad slasher in a horror movie than a robin-sized songbird. Yet this behavior is the ingenious adaptation of the shrike, a bird with the carnivorous tastes of a hawk without the raptor’s full set of predatory equipment. Like hawks, shrikes have keen eyesight and sharp beaks, but they do not have the same powerful talons. “They are perching birds with delicate feet,” says Carola Haas, a wildlife ecologist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg. “Consequently they can’t hold on to their food and eat it at the same time.”
So what’s a hungry shrike to do but look to nature for the necessary silverware? The birds use everything from cactus spines to hawthorn thorns to barbed wire barbs for skewering their prey, which includes insects, amphibians, reptiles, other birds and even small mammals. The two American shrike species, the loggerhead and the northern, are the only songbirds in the country that regularly prey on other adult songbirds. But despite their butchering habits, shrikes are in trouble. Data are scant for the northern, which breeds in Alaska and Canada, and ranges as far south as New Mexico in the winter. But the loggerhead, once found throughout most of the United States (as well as in Canada and Mexico), has declined an average of 3.6 percent yearly since 1966, according to U.S. Geological Survey figures.