The "Butcher"!

I have not see many shrikes in my birding life but I know that they are endangered. The Internet bird hotline tells me that they ( Northern shrike) are very rare in Ontario. As a Bert Miller follower as a youth I learned to appreciate not only flora but fauna too. Bert was a great birder. I told him of the cache of grasshoppers, beetles and even a field mouse impaled on thorns on a bush near our nearby C.N.R, rail line. Bert said to me, “Look fot the masked butcher, Earl.” Back then we called this bird the “Butcher” shrike. I did and saw the robin-sized bird more than once as it returned to its food storage site. Years passed - no shrikes in Fort Erie until recently when the birder hotline said that they were returning to Niagara. Great! That is when in the Saturday Star, Bob’s Aaron’s article caught my wife, Elaine’s eye, and she saved me the interesting piece.