A loggerhead shrike hunts from an old fencepost/Jim McCormac
February 1, 2026
NATURE
Jim McCormac
On my recent trip to Houston, I built in plenty of time to explore areas along the Gulf Coast and vicinity. Once outside of the sphere of Houston, one can get into wide-open, sparsely inhabited places. That’s where we spent our time, primarily looking for birds to photograph.
It wasn’t long before we saw our first loggerhead shrike, perched on a roadside wire. By the time our travels were over, Shauna and I had seen 80 or more of these fascinating songbirds.
The loggerhead shrike is so named because of its disproportionately large noggin – a “loggerhead.” Perhaps more interesting is its scientific genus name, Lanius. That Latin word translates to “butcher.” That relates to an oft-used colloquialism for the shrike: butcherbird.
Put it this way: If shrikes were the size of whooping cranes, we humans could be in a world of hurt. While a loggerhead shrike is only about the size of a catbird, their brutality is on the level of a great white shark.
Their prey can range up to the size of a vole – which weighs at least as much as the shrike. Remarkably, in areas where they occur with 13-lined ground squirrels, shrikes can capture and kill those.
One of these mammals weighs up to 250 grams – five times the heft of a shrike. That’s akin to a psychotically homicidal Pee-wee Herman taking down a passive André the Giant. More common fare includes large insects such as grasshoppers, big spiders and even amphibians and reptiles.
While shrikes have large powerful raptorial bills, they lack the strong feet and talons of raptors. Hence comes the world of hurt part for victims. If you are lucky, the attacking shrike quickly snaps your vertebrae and the end comes fast.
Unlucky victims do not die rapidly and are relocated to a sharp object such as a projecting nail – as in my photo – sharp thorn or some similar skewering implement.
The prey is unceremoniously impaled, with the barbed wire or whatever serving as its substitute talons. Once stuck, pieces can be ripped off the body and eaten at the shrike’s leisure. The stuff of nightmares, so it would seem, but it’s business as usual for the butcherbird.
Loggerhead shrikes once were common, at least locally, in Ohio. While originally more of a southern bird, the clearing of the vast eastern deciduous forest – which blanketed 95% of Ohio – allowed this species of open country to expand northward. They reached their peak here in the first few decades of the 20th century.
At the time, agriculture was far more wildlife-friendly than it is today. Farming landscapes tended to be mosaics of cropland, fallow fields and meadows, and brushy fencerows that supported an abundance of insects, rodents and small songbirds – the shrike’s stock in trade.
In his 1935 publication "Distribution of the Breeding Birds of Ohio," ornithologist Lawrence Hicks noted that loggerhead shrikes were “very common” in some regions of the state and were likely present in every county.
As agribusiness increasingly eliminated non-cropland, increased the use of pesticides and segued to massive planting of monocultures, it greatly reduced biodiversity. Shrikes began to decline by the 1940s and that trend continued to the present.
When I penned my book, "Birds of Ohio," in 2004, I noted that there were perhaps only two nesting pairs of shrikes annually. Twelve years later, I was a co-author of "The Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in Ohio" and authored the loggerhead shrike account.
By this time, the shrike had been listed as endangered by the Ohio Division of Wildlife, a status it still carries. In my account, I noted that it was now one of Ohio’s rarest breeding species.
I suppose one might be forgiven for thinking that perhaps it’s a good thing that such a barbaric predator has been vanquished. But that would be to think in anthropomorphic terms. Shrikes just do what they evolved to do, same as sharks, mosquitoes, snakes, scorpions, and human beings.
While it might appear that all is lost for loggerhead shrikes in Ohio, as agriculture now covers 55% of the state, and the days of shrikes (and lots of other wildlife) in those regions are over, new possibilities have arisen from an unlikely source.
Strip mining – using large machinery to uncover and extract coal seams – began in Ohio about 100 years ago. In total, nearly 450,000 acres were mined – an area larger than Franklin County.
These sites were left as lunar wastelands largely devoid of flora and fauna. In 1972, laws were enacted that required the reclamation of former mine lands. Tens of thousands of acres in southeastern Ohio have been reclaimed, and these sites resemble savannas and prairies – excellent shrike habitat, or so it would appear.
By the time reclamation began to bear fruit, shrikes had already collapsed and thus could probably not populate these sites.
Enter our neighbor to the north, Canada. Loggerhead shrikes formerly occurred in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec but had disappeared there as well. In the late 1990s, Canadian biologists embarked on a captive breeding and release program, introducing shrikes into suitable habitat. This effort worked and has maintained a core shrike population. In 2012, shrikes fledged an impressive 82 chicks.
Perhaps it’s time to emulate the Canadians and consider a similar program to repatriate the charismatic butcherbird back to the Buckeye State.
Naturalist Jim McCormac writes a column for The Dispatch on the first and third Sundays of the month. He also writes about nature at jimmccormac.blogspot.com.
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