This Tiny Songbird Rolls Its Head to Break Its Victim's Neck
The loggerhead shrike is a hawk trapped in the body of a finch.
There are places in the southern United States where the roadsides are fenced with barbed wire, and the wire is adorned with corpses. The carcasses belong to lizards, rodents, small birds, and even snakes, all impaled on the sharp prongs. These grisly dioramas are the work of the unlikeliest of butchers: a small bird called the loggerhead shrike.
The shrike is a hawk trapped in the body of a finch. From a distance, it looks like any other songbird, perched on a high vantage point. But from those perches, the two-ounce bird frequently swoops onto its prey, and subdues it with the murderous, hooked tip of its beak. “It’s like seeing a rabbit running around with long canines and a mane and acting like a lion,” says Margaret Rubega from the University of Connecticut. “I personally think they’re very badass.”
Without the powerful talons of true raptors, shrikes only tear into their meals after first impaling them onto sharp points, like thorns or barbed wire. This behavior is the source of the bird’s infamy, and its nickname: the butcherbird. But it’s fundamentally just an act of storage; the bird only impales prey that it has already killed. And although most of its victims are insects, shrikes have been known to dispatch mice and lizards that are up to three times their body weight.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/this-tiny-songbird-rolls-its-head-to-break-its-victims-neck/569341/
