{"id":34190,"date":"2015-09-23T06:18:48","date_gmt":"2015-09-23T12:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=34190"},"modified":"2015-09-23T06:34:27","modified_gmt":"2015-09-23T12:34:27","slug":"loggerhead-shrike-devouring-an-impaled-vole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/09\/23\/loggerhead-shrike-devouring-an-impaled-vole\/","title":{"rendered":"Loggerhead Shrike Devouring An Impaled Vole"},"content":{"rendered":"

Loggerhead Shrikes are often called “butcher birds” and this one demonstrated for me how that moniker was earned.<\/p>\n

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\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/1600, f\/6.3, ISO 400, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u00a0photographed the bird in the morning two days ago near Fairfield, Utah. At first it\u00a0looked innocent enough as it perched in an old, dead thorny\u00a0tree but it soon became obvious that it was there for a reason.<\/p>\n

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\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Just a few feet away there was half of a vole carcass that the shrike had already impaled on a thorn and the bird quickly began to feed on it. Shrikes are “wannabe raptors” that often prey on small amphibians, reptiles mammals and birds. They lack the stronger feet and talons of true raptors which would enable them to tear their prey apart easily so they’ve adopted the alternative strategy of impaling prey on thorns and barbed wire so that they can pull against it – just as this bird is doing.<\/p>\n

Look carefully and you can see one foot of the vole with five little toes sticking up.<\/p>\n

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\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/2000, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sometimes the shrike pulled off small pieces of meat and swallowed them but other times…<\/p>\n

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\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

it swallowed much larger pieces that consisted largely of hair and hide (and in this case, a foot).<\/p>\n

At this point I managed to maneuver my pickup a little closer to the tree for a slightly better look at the proceedings.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/4000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

The skin of the rodent was tough and the shrike sometimes really had to pull hard\u00a0against the thorn to get a piece off.<\/p>\n

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\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

When the piece of hair, hide and muscle was long and stringy…<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

it wasn’t easy to swallow but the shrike always managed to get it down.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

When there was just a small bit of the vole left on the thorn the shrike initially couldn’t figure out how to get it off. It kept pulling but the hide of the vole was too tough and wouldn’t tear so the bird went in closer for an inspection (in this shot I like the shadow of the vole’s foot and toes on the forehead of the bird).<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

But eventually the shrike figured out that if it lifted up<\/em> on the carcass it would easily come off the thorn.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\"loggerhead<\/p>\n

1\/5000, f\/6.3, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

And that’s exactly what happened. Here we get our best look at the thorn the vole was impaled on. The shrike then swallowed\u00a0this last bit and flew off.<\/p>\n

Obviously none of these images are aesthetically pleasing (for a variety of reasons…) but that’s often the case when my posts focus on behavior. I’m ok with that. In my view photos of interesting behaviors often trump the more common “beautiful pictures”.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Loggerhead Shrikes are often called “butcher birds” and this one demonstrated for me how that moniker was earned.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34203,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,392,346],"tags":[63,2689,2690,409,206,256,2691,311,315],"class_list":["post-34190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-loggerhead-shrikes-shrikes-and-vireos","tag-butcher-bird","tag-fairfield","tag-immpaling-prey","tag-lanius-ludovicianus","tag-loggerhead-shrike","tag-prey","tag-thorn","tag-utah-2","tag-vole"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/loggerhead-shrike-3624-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-8Ts","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}