It started with the severed head of a baby bird. Then there were two black beetles and a decapitated lizard -- all found impaled on the thorns of small citrus shrubs in John Henry's backyard on Padre Island, Texas.
The days went by and other severed heads were left pinioned to twigs and thorns. Fearing that a dangerous person, or possibly some violent child, might be creeping into his fenced-in yard and killing the small wildlife, Henry reported the strange incidents to police.
"It's just weird," Henry said.
"I was walking around back here and noticed some ants at the base of the tree and I followed them up the trunk and there was a bird head, a baby bird head."
He and his wife, Jamie, thought perhaps the bird had crashed into the tree impaling itself by accident, but then he spotted a beetle in the same tree.
After a couple of sleepless nights, he decided to report it to Corpus Christi police. Henry said the woman who took the report told him she had never, in all her years with the police department, ever heard of such a thing.
The report led to a police blotter item that was published in the local newspaper. And while the report was an odd one, some people in the community had actually heard of such a thing -- avid birders and bird experts.
The creepy way the heads were left like totems of warning matched the hunting and feeding methods of a small, masked predator that eats birds bigger than itself, bugs such as crickets and beetles, and small lizards and snakes.
"It's the exact behavior of the loggerhead shrike," said Tony Amos, a bird expert with Animal Rehabilitation Keep.
The carnivorous songbird, which looks like a mockingbird with a black stripe across its eyes, stakes its prey and lines them up like meats in an old-fashioned butcher shop, hence its nickname, "the butcher bird," Amos said. The bird lives year-round in the southern United States but is not typically found in Pennsylvania.
"They'll eat anything but the head and leave it on the thorn," he said. "Some people think that's sort of grim but that's nature."
