Plate 57 – Loggerhead Shrike

While the Northern shrike is keeping more so to the north, its close relative, the Loggerhead shrike, is trying to hold out in the southern parts of North America. It is an unfortunate choice because, as John James Audubon notes, “It never comes near houses, although it frequents the fields around them.” The southern part of the United States has experienced over the last 200 years one of the largest housing booms on the face of the planet and at the same time lost almost all of its prairies, meadows, and grasslands to agriculture. If the Loggerhead shrike hopes to survive, it is going to have to adapt to how human beings keep transforming the landscape into houses and buildings and other purposes that suit their own needs.