A songbird known for skewering its prey on thorns or barbed wire sent birders scrambling to Maryland’s Eastern Shore when it showed up for a visit in December and lingered into early January.
A loggerhead shrike sighting in the Chesapeake Bay watershed is rare these days. But this bird’s tags told an even more unique story: The shrike was raised in captivity at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, and released into the wild in Canada before making its way back south to Caroline County, Maryland.
“Everyone is so excited about that sighting, because, unfortunately, it’s so rare to see this species anymore,” said Erica Royer, an aviculturist at the Smithsonian.
Looking like a very large sparrow—about the size of a cardinal—the gray-and-white loggerhead shrike features black streaks along the edges of its wings and tail. A black “Zorro” mask across its eyes and reaching halfway back on its oversized head helps distinguish it from the similarly colored northern mockingbird.
The shrike’s genus name, Lanius, is derived from the Latin word for butcher, a nickname the species has earned. A sharp raptor-like hook on its beak enables it to snag insects, small vertebrates, amphibians, mice and even the occasional small songbird. But rather than devouring its prey immediately, the shrike will often impale it on thorns or barbed wire for a while, much like a butcher hanging meat in a larder.
“Chickadees and cardinals will eat insects, but they’re not butchering other birds and sticking them on thorns,” said Matt Felperin, a roving naturalist with the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority.
An avid birder and photographer, Felperin raced from Northern Virginia to Caroline County, MD, to document the loggerhead shrike’s visit after hearing about it through birding networks.
Maryland used to support healthy populations of the loggerhead shrike, but they are now listed as endangered in the state and appear only occasionally during the species’ southward migration in the fall and winter. Of the 30 species of shrikes worldwide, the loggerhead is the only one found only in North America. The birds can still be found in parts of Virginia, mostly along the Interstate 81 corridor, but loggerhead shrikes are now considered a threatened species in Virginia, too.
The species’ population has declined by as much as 76% across parts of North America since the 1960s, when the North American Breeding Bird Survey began tracking bird populations. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, loggerheads in the northern parts of their range—the middle latitudes of the U.S.—migrate north in the spring to breed in Canada. Populations in the southern U.S. and Mexico, meanwhile, tend to be year-round residents.
They are most likely to be spotted on the edges of farms or shrublands, perching on low branches or barbed wire fences as they scour the landscape for prey.
The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute began breeding loggerhead shrikes in captivity in Front Royal, Virgina, in 2011 as part of a broader effort to boost the beleaguered bird’s populations. Other habitat-focused programs, like the Virginia Grassland Bird Initiative, are working to make the open, shrubby spaces these birds require more available.
The Institute in Front Royal also raises rare birds like kiwis and Guam kingfishers. In the ’80s and ’90s, loggerhead shrikes would try to nest in the its crane enclosure, making use of barbed wire around the edges. But, after their numbers sharply declined in recent decades, the facility became a natural home for the recovery effort of shrikes, too.
Today, the Smithsonian facility raises and releases 20–30 juvenile loggerheads per year. In the spring, crews drive them overnight to Ontario, where partner organizations release them at their main remaining breeding grounds in the province.
The birds are each banded with multicolored rings that tell the story of where they’ve come from and where they’ve been banded along the way.
Several years ago, one of the birds born at the Smithsonian center was spotted in Winchester, VA. But finding one of the Front Royal-raised birds in Maryland is an even rarer occurrence. It’s not that the birds are simply returning to their birthplace, said Royer, so much as “they settle on the first suitable habitat they come to, which nowadays is few and far between.”
Open grasslands next to partial woodlands are some of the best settings for the birds to practice their unique hunting behaviors — and for watchful birders to find them.
DJ Washington, the Smithsonian’s loggerhead shrike keeper, said the impaling method serves a couple of purposes. Because shrikes lack the strong talons of a larger raptor, skewering its supper allows them to hold their food steady while ripping off bites. Mounting prey on thorns or barbed wire spikes also enables the birds to save food for later or to share meals with a mate or young, turning a fence or shrub into a pantry.
Felperin said that, in one case, the method of leaving its lunch for later gives time for the toxins in an Eastern lubber grasshopper to break down before the shrike consumes it.
Washington said researchers have witnessed shrike chicks practicing these impaling-prey techniques even in captivity: Fledgling birds will use their hooked, tooth-like beaks to skewer leaves on twigs.
“Most people assume it’s a behavior that’s taught,” he said. “Interestingly, it seems this piercing behavior is an innate, instinctive thing they do.”
When Felperin hurried to Caroline County, MD, to find the loggerhead shrike in the wild, he got to see the impalement method in action.
“I have a picture of it posing next to its grasshopper kabob,” he said. “They are a gruesome little songbird.”
This story first appeared at bayjournal.com on Feb. 7, 2025.
