I was quite young, perhaps 10, when I found the head.

 I had by that point seen a few gruesome horror films on the sly, but my imagination couldn’t grasp an explanation for the sight of the severed head of a goldfinch impaled on the barbed wire fence at the bottom of the field. It must have been spring; the goldfinch was in his bright courtship attire. I must have looked anxiously over my shoulder.

 A decade or so later I read about shrikes, and another decade or two passed before I saw one. This winter again I’ve heard a northern shrike singing in the field across the road. Its scientific name Lanius excubitor translates to “butcher watchman.” Carolus Linnaeus, the famed father of modern taxonomy, gave this bird its name of “watchman.”

 Linnaeus was praised for developing a logical, double-name system for describing the relationships among plants based on similarities in their reproductive structures. He was apparently more patient in observing the minutiae of flora than fauna because he concluded that the shrike was taking its sentinel stance at the tops of bushes, poles, and trees to forewarn little birds of the approach of a hawk.

 Shrikes may indeed be watching for hawks in their own self-interest, but they also have a culinary interest in the songbirds. This revelation has been utterly horrifying to some bird lovers. A close look at a shrike reveals an unusual head-size-to-body ratio and a distinct raptor hook to the bill. Sweet little birds sometimes overlook this anatomical feature. It is said that the shrike will even lurk in the underbrush beckoning curious birds with pleading murmurs.

 It was an unfamiliar voice that drew my attention to the shrike, a series of not-quite-melodic phrases that go nowhere and seem not to repeat. “If perseverance deserved success, the shrike would take high marks as a singer,” wrote Frank Chapman in the 1895 Handbook of Eastern North America. It is written that both sexes will sing and, come to think of it, I wonder why this bird would be singing at all, given that its breeding home—Alaska and central Canada—is so far north?

 This wolf in sheep’s clothing has the delicate feet of any perching bird. The element of surprise and a swift knock on the back of the head secures a meal for the shrike. The word “shrike” has the same Anglo Saxon root as “shriek,” though whether the shriek comes from the shrike, the victim, or the horrified bird-fancier is not clear.

 “One has to have something of the savage in him to enjoy thoroughly the study of the shrike,” wrote Edward Brayton Clark in 1901. “As a matter of fact, the close daily observance of the bird involves some little sacrifice for the person whose nature is tempered with mercy. The shrike is essentially cruel. It is a butcher pure and simple and a butcher that knows no merciful methods in plying its trade. More than this, the shrike is the most arrant hypocrite in the whole bird calendar. Its appearance as it sits apparently sunning itself, but in reality keeping sharp lookout for prey, is the perfect counterfeit of innocence.”

 The older nature books are full of such accusations directed at this hunter. However, the shrike gives chase solely for the purpose of culling the not-so-fleet to secure food. These writers choose to forget that a human hunter often kills for mere sport or trophy.

 It isn’t every year one can find a shrike in a New England pasture. “Like the bold Norse robber barons of old, these birds come down from their Northern wilds to prey on Southern wealth,” wrote Ora Willis Knight in 1908. Ornithologists report that it is mostly the immature shrikes with faint barring of the breast that wander south in the fall and depart in the spring. In times of cyclical rodent crash in Canada, even more birds will visit and these may travel even further south into the U.S. At this time of year, this northern shrike is sating him or herself mostly with rodents.

 In its summer breeding grounds, the shrike is also known as grasshopper hawk, cricket hawk, or mouse hawk, acknowledging the main staples of its diet. Shrikes can also take a few snakes and frogs. Like a storefront butcher, a male shrike may hang a flamboyant display of fresh kill in a thorn bush or shrub to impress a prospective mate with his powers of providence. Food may be similarly cached against lean times, and this is probably the circumstance I witnessed so many years ago.

 If you should be lucky enough to glimpse one of these gray visitors, wish him or her well on the passage north come spring. Certainly we have mice to spare here this winter.

Note: A version of this article was first published in the Bradford Bridge, a community newsletter

By Ann Eldridge, UNH Cooperative Extension Wildlife Coverts Cooperator