When you think of birds of prey, you probably don’t think of a Shrike. Unless you’re really into birds (or was raised by someone who is), you likely don’t even know what a Shrike is. Birds of prey that come to mind for most people are eagles, hawks, vultures…large, winged things, wider than a man when stretched out to their full potential. You probably conjured up an image of dark, glossy feathers, thorny talons thick as fork tines, birds that rip the throat from their prey with a single, violent, apathetic jerk. The average bird of prey has a wingspan of 75 inches (that’s over six feet). But there are other tiny, carnivorous avians, lurking in North America: in our suburbs, chilly forests, among midwest shrubbery, and along quiet ravines. The Shrike is an oddity: both a songbird and a bird of prey. Their average wingspan is only a foot – about the same size as a robin. Shrikes are proof you don’t have to be large to be dangerous.

Did you know you can actually buy a “birds of prey” sound machine? It’s true, my gym has one. Every time I arrive and leave I hear the angry screeching of eagles. The gym has a huge sign on the main entrance, “Yes!  Those are eagle sounds you hear! No they’re not real!” When I asked the gym owner about it, she explained that woodpeckers had been trying to nest in the building. They peck holes in small cracks, expanding them to only six inches wide, but then they can tunnel as far as two feet deep. That’s bad news for any building manager. One of the only ways to scare off woodpeckers is with constant birds of prey sounds, so they believe the area is too dangerous to build a family.

Birds have been used for centuries as symbols. If you’re a writer, or reader, you’re familiar: doves symbolize peace, sparrows can mean homecoming, flamingos were associated with the Sun God in ancient cultures; in America, bald eagles symbolize freedom. Peregrine falcons, I’ve noticed, are particularly popular in contemporary young adult literature. I wonder why that is. The Peregrine falcon makes infamous appearances in the 1959 classic, My Side of the Mountain, and its well revered sequel, Frightful’s Mountain (1999). I have vivid, happy memories of reading both, snuggled into a cozy nook or under a large table in my fourth grade classroom: the top floor of a 100 year old school house that had been converted, and then added onto, to accommodate the rest of the elementary school in southeastern Wisconsin. 

In American English, we have a whole arsenal of bird-related idioms: “Early bird gets the worm,” people who enjoy staying up late are called "night owls.” And one my dad always used to say, “you can’t hoot with the owls and fly with the eagles.” Speaking of owls, if you grew up in the midwest in the 1990s, chances are dissecting an owl pellet was a pivotal moment in your elementary science curriculum. I remember an uncanny amount about the owl pellet I dissected. I was in fourth grade, in Ms. Veretty’s class. She was a tall, willowy woman, with dark hair and piercing eyes. You could tell how young she was because her favorite style to wear her finger nails was two inches long and covered in blue, iridescent polish. My partner for dissecting the owl pellet was named Andy. Ms. Veretty took pictures as we dissected our pellets, using school-issued tweezers to separate the tiny bones and try to discern them from teeth, set aside the tufts of hair we would later glue onto construction paper as proof of our dissection success. She took pictures of us - some posed, others candid, on a disposable camera she bought for our classroom. At the end of the year, she divided the printed pictures up among the class. I still have the creased and glossy 4x6’s of myself and Andy. He is smiling for the camera, and I am bent over the owl pellet on the desk, engrossed in my work. In the photo, I am a carbon copy of my father’s sense of style: bell bottom jeans, an oversized lime green T-shirt, and a tiny braid in my long, waist length hair, intertwined with a small ribbon.  To round out the unit, we were each given a different kind of owl at random to research and create a presentation about.  I was given the burrowing owl. Literally one of the only fucking owls that doesn’t build a nest in trees. I don’t know why, but my classmates decided this greatly added to their arsenal to tease me. I was already the smallest kid in our class, maybe the whole grade. I had been made fun of for being one of the smallest  pretty much since kindergarten, so by fourth grade I was more annoyed than hurt.

I talked to the school counselor almost every week - a kind, lovely, smart woman whose name I cannot remember for the life of me. Her office was located in an extra room off the school’s gymnasium. That means, the only way to access her was to walk the length of the entire gymnasium, which hosted classes every hour of the day. Every single student in gym class saw you coming, and watched your slow march (or anxious half-run) to the counselor’s office. There was nothing else on the other side of the gym besides the Phy. Ed. teacher’s office, and no one ever went there. I remember telling the counselor that the leader of all this was a girl named Ellen. Ellen wasn’t fat, but she was perhaps bigger than average; she just took a long time to lose her baby fat. The advice the counselor gave me changed my life, but as an educator today, I’m pretty sure it was highly unethical.  She told me to try saying,

“Ellen, if you don’t stop making fun of me for being small, I’m going to start making fun of you for being big-boned.”  Now that I’m writing this, I’m starting to doubt my own memories. Would a professional say that? Well, that’s the way I’ve remembered it for decades, and I see no point in questioning the memory now. I don’t even remember crossing paths with Ellen after we moved on to middle school. So, I said it. I didn’t shout it, I said it, in an icy cool voice. It shut Ellen up forever.  As it turns out, you don’t have to be loud to be cruel.

Saying those magic words did not, however, deter some of my more boisterous classmates from nicknaming me “Little Feather”  after our end of the year Wisconsin Program production, in which half of us were cast as pilgrims, the other half as Native Americans. In my mind, we rehearsed for months, but it may have only been weeks in reality. I recall spending nearly every period reserved for Social Studies lessons being assigned our reading parts, and practicing them in front of the whole class – one at a time – until they were memorized. On the appointed afternoon, parents, grandparents, and siblings shuffled into the small gymnasium, 100 fourth graders arranged on three levels of precarious risers, cloaked in construction paper hats and home-made costumes draped over regular school day clothes. I distinctly remember one boy in my class, Ryan, who stood behind me during the program whispering “Little Feather” in my ear at random intervals. Looking back on this nickname today, I am horrified at the gall with which my 10-year-old classmates appropriated culturally insensitive nicknames. Even more so, I am disturbed by the fact that no teacher – that I can remember – ever reprimanded them. Sidenote: this same Ryan would go on to marry one of my high school best friends, Katie, shortly after they turned 18. They entered the armed forces together after graduation and divorced a year later after a series of messy affairs (on both of their ends, I believe).

Wisconsin is no stranger to bird enthusiasts and bird hunters alike. Grouse – a medium sized, woodland bird commonly hunted and eaten – are common in the northern part of the state. When I was growing up, my family had a cabin in that territory, inherited from my maternal grandparents. My father hunted with his father-in-law in those woods, tracking and shooting grouse for years before I was even born. All throughout my childhood and teenagehood, my family would vacation at that cabin regularly. I can recall my little brother as young as 5, wearing a camouflage jacket and bright orange hat, a child-size shotgun in his hands. My dad always hunted grouse when we went up north, whether it was their season or not, I suspect. Some days he’d come back from an hours-long trek in the woods with 10 birds hanging off his belt. He’d lay them out, one by one, so my mom could take a picture (assuming we remembered film for the Nikon), before straddling each one, a foot on either wing, grabbing the legs and yanking hard upward. My father is not a big man, he is 5’6” on a good day, 3 or 4 inches shorter than the average American. Despite this, he is a man that knows his own strength. With a crunch and slurp, he’d tear the torso meat free from the wings and the tail, leaving three beautiful, feathered fans on the grass, each ending in a bloody stump. That’s what I remember best about the grouse, that I found their tail fans mesmerizing. They were so soft, like cashmere, their thick feathers a rich brown, dotted and lined symmetrically with inky black and golden yellow. Though I always thought of the act of dressing the birds as violent, it left behind the most vivid beauty.

As a college English major in the era of both digital and print texts, I read weekly, devouring books, poems, essays, and articles at a pace I could never hope to keep up with now that I have to work full time. I had to take more courses on Shakespeare than I could count. I wasn’t a huge fan (especially of the Histories), but a line from the comedy A Midsummer’s Night Dream stuck with me: “Though she be but little, she is fierce.” I resonated with that. Surprisingly, I grew resilient, not depressed, from my years of being bullied. That, coupled with my parent’s belief that I was the best thing since sliced bread, had allowed me to grow confidently into myself as I was leaving high school. The result was a personality that was half bravado, half loneliness. I was desperate for someone to come along and show me there was safety in vulnerability. Without a second party, I couldn't convince myself it was possible.

Physically, I was small (still am), but felt the need to show others I could be lethal. In college, I felt the need to feel tough, to act tough, to show tough. In part, this might have been a way to protect myself from becoming the 1 in 4 women who are sexually assaulted (it happened to me anyways).  I would go out drinking on weekends, often with a group of male friends, my chest puffed out and hair fluffed with literal feathers in it while I strutted around, daring people to mess with me.  I’d commit small violences as a way to show others my size did not weaken me. I would punch boys in the face just to show them I could, jump fences to take short cuts, and perform cartwheels across street crosswalks to display how “I wasn’t really that drunk.” As a 36 year old woman, I am horrified looking back at some of the things I did. I’m sure I’m not the only one. But I look back at my 18 and 19 year old self and think girl, you were just a little girl. With almost 17 years hindsight, the things I did in college take on a humbling, shameful glow. Had I been ready to be pushed out of the nest when I was so immature? My first two years of college were a period of slow  falling disguised as flight.

At some point, 1977 Australian best-seller The Thorn Birds fell into my lap. If you’ve ever read it, or watched the 1983 dramatic series, then maybe you were like me. Maybe you couldn’t tell if the myth about “the thorn bird” was true or not.  Legend has it that “the thorn birds”, though classified as song birds, live their entire lives in complete silence. The bird searches its entire life for the perfect thorn tree. Then, when it has finally found the tree, it opens its beak and sings. The bird belts out the most beautiful, enchanting melody human ears could ever hope to hear. It uses every last bit of its breath and strength to grace the world with its long awaited song. And when it has finished, it jams itself onto a thorn, impaling its tiny body on the spike of its choosing, offering itself up to return to Mother Earth. It sounds terribly romantic, doesn’t it? So I looked it up. It’s not true. As we all know, behind every myth and every lie, is a shred of truth.

Though my father is the one in my memories who dealt most physically with birds – hunting, carving, seasoning, cooking – my mother was the one who taught me about them. She’s what you’d call a recreational bird watcher. She’s got a pair of decent binoculars (a more valuable gift to her than any pair of designer shoes), and she prefers to watch with a beer in one hand. She might buy a guidebook, but she’d never write in it, let alone take notes herself in a journal. She and her second husband travel up to Horicon Marsh to watch the cranes in spring, or they drive four hours north to his family’s cabin most of the summer, enjoying the eerie call of loons on a quiet lake. Sometimes, she’ll even pull over when driving if she gets a good look at an eagle or hawk circling on a country road. 

She loves a nice, slow walk in the woods. When we go together, she will frequently stop midstride and admonish me, “Quiet.” We will stand there for a minute, heads cocked toward the trees, her hearing a bird and me half hoping to and half pretending. Then she’ll say something like, “Hear that?” And I always say, “What?” She will tell me what kind of bird it is, re-singing their song in an attempt to teach me. The one that stands out in my mind is the whippoorwill. My mom will say, “Hear that? It sings its own name. Whipper-will,  Whipper-will,  Whipper-will…” putting a strong emphasis on will. Her other favorite call to repeat, whenever she hears it, is the chick-a-dee. “Chick-uh-dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. Chick-uh-dee, dee, dee, dee, dee.” Those two I remembered easily; it wasn’t until I started researching what “the thorn bird” may have been born from, that I remembered my mother mentioning Shrikes. When I started reading about them, I thought their name looked an awful lot like the word “shirk.” In English, the word means to evade, or avoid sneakily, usually referring to duties or responsibilities. But I found it’s also an Islamic religious word that roughly translates to “sharing” or "associating." How odd: the same word, two meanings juxtaposed next to each other. Although, the Shrike itself is a juxtaposition: a blood-thirsty killer that more closely resembles a stuffed animal.

Loggerhead and Northern Shrikes are native to Northern Canada, and the oft-tauted “fly over” midwest states, including Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin (no pun intended). An unconventional mix of vocalist and carnivore, there are actually over 30 different species of Shrikes, and they can be found on every continent except Antarctica. All About Birds calls them a “pint size predator.” How cute. The Loggerhead and Northern Shrikes are some of the most well known because they are most fascinating. They thrive in the bitter cold, but unlike “the thorn birds,” they don’t impale themselves…they impale their prey. Anything from beetles to bugs and insects, tiny mammals, rodents, and even other small birds make up their diet. They’ve been colloquially nicknamed “butcher birds.” Shrikes lack the classic talons birds of prey have, but they’ve developed  a similar appetite. While there are certainly noticeable differences between the species, they share a killing tactic: grasping and/or stabbing prey with a sharp beak or extra tooth, and then impaling it on a stationary spike. Sometimes, the purpose of impalement is to ensure the death of the meal before digging in. Other times, it’s to save the rest of the food for later. This is especially common for Shrikes who live in the upper Northern hemisphere, where colder temperatures ensure food keeps longer. These tiny terrors will use everything from thorns on flowers or bushes, sharpened branch ends, even the tops of man-made barbed wire fences! These birds have been around for hundreds or thousands of years, yet as man has progressed they’ve shamelessly adapted to use our creations for their own convenience.

Sometimes, I look back and feel sorry for that girl in college. That girl who both was and wasn’t me. My chest aches for that girl, her confidence defined solely by the number of minutes of vapid attention she earned on a Friday night. I can see her, flitting from boy to boy (they were not men, yet, not really), saving this one or that one for later, eventually forgetting both. Sometimes, I want to apologize for her, for all the people she used, for all those she pricked with tiny thorns of lies and manipulation and exaggeration. I see her outline, sharp against the horizon; she will always be a part of me, but I have learned I do not have to carry her shame and guilt and mistakes with me each day. The person I am now can leave those memories hanging  elsewhere, perhaps on a sharp branch, or thorny bush.  I will have the time to untangle them later. She, and I, are proof that you don’t have to be innocent to survive.