Shrike's Spikes

Sometimes I get maybe too into a subject. I'll spend hours reading about it online, and usually relay ideas here or work them into different aspects of other pieces I'm working on. One thing you learn if you're like that--having an insatiable thirst for knowledge and data--is that there's always something else cool that you've never heard of.

I've typed plenty of words over my plenty of blogs about the extant dinosauria--birds. I, like so many others, am intrigued by birds. On Netflix we found a BBC documentary series on birds, eight or nine episodes, and having watched them, another crazy piece of bird knowledge was bestowed upon my humble head.

Shrikes. I had never heard of the shrike, a series of passerine birds. Passerines are the perching-birds, but you would easily recognize other members as crows and ravens and jays and cardinals.

One of the crazy things about shrikes, though, is that they have a special way of storing food:

They leave their dead and/or dying prey impaled on thorn bushes or barbed-wire fencing or other sharp objects. They do it to bugs and lizards and small mammals, like the above I nabbed from a Google search.

How had I never come across shrikes before?