A few great grey shrikes that are passing through, or will stay here for the winter, are now dotted about the country. They live up to their colloquial name of “butcher bird” both in their behaviour and their appearance. They have a heavy, hooked, black beak, and a sinister black mask that runs from it across their eyes. They also have black and white wings. Otherwise they are grey birds, with a trace of pink on the stomach that one may fancy is a smear of blood. They frequent open country — boggy land, heaths and wide fields — where they perch conspicuously and fearlessly on the top spray of a bush or hedge. They look large sitting there, though they are no bigger than a blackbird. They swoop down on small birds such as chaffinches and linnets, and will sometimes fly along a hedge like a sparrowhawk, snapping up a bird that they have startled. They also look out for mice and beetles and pounce down on them. Most impressively, they preserve food in a larder, impaling their prey temporarily on the spikes of a hawthorn bush, or on the strands of a barbed wire fence.