Loggerhead Shrike A Bird Of Prey - a photo on Flickriver

                 The loggerhead shrike, Lanius ludovicianus, looks like just another songbird. Intimidatig it ain't. That is until you get a close look at the curved beak and the idea pops into your brain that something else must going on with this bird. 

And you'd be right. Despite its relatively diminutive size, the loggerhead shrike is a bird of prey as well as a songbird. Despite its lack of stature, it is able to carry prey as big as itself. It has a body length of about nine or 10 inches and wingspan of about a foot. It is a gray bird, with a black mask, black wings with a white patch and a black tail. Its bill is short, curved raptor-like at the tip but it doesn't have raptor-like talons. It does have extraordinary eyesight that enables it to spot a grasshopper — a favorite food — at 70 yards. 

The loggerhead is a year-round resident of Florida as well as much of the southern and central United States. There are also migratory populations that spend the summer farther north into Canada and winter in parts of Texas and Mexico. 

It lives in open places with a few trees or shrubs for perching, or in forests with open areas adjacent. It's particularly fond of trees and shrubs with thorns or spines, which serve two purposes, one obvious, the other not so much. It tends to perch on posts, signs, fences, barbed wire and in trees and shrubs, where it scans for a meal, which might be a bug, a bird, a reptile or a rodent. When it sees a tasty meal, it will swoop down, perhaps hover for a second and hit its target. Small prey will be eaten right away; larger items will be hauled off to a thorny tree or shrub, where the hapless victim is impaled and stored to be eaten at a later date. That habit allows loggerheads to eat prey, like monarch butterflies, that would be poisonous to other animals. Storing the meal allows volatile poisons to break down into harmless substances. Loggerheads are one of the few animals able to eat the otherwise toxic eastern lubber grasshopper. It eats the head and abdomen while tossing away the poisonous thorax.

I found this one along Joe Overstreet Road in Osceola County, Florida.

Taken on: May 28, 2019

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