At loggerheads with habitat destruction

Each summer I take a trip up to the Carden Alvar. I’m sure that I’ve spoken of it before. There are a few unique birds that can be found easily in that area and while not quite nowhere else, at least very few other local places. One such bird is the Loggerhead Shrike.

Shrikes are fun little birds. They are one of the few predatory songbirds. They like to kill small birds and rodents and then pin their corpses onto the thorns of certain trees to act as a larder. They are also a threatened species in Canada (threatened in the west and endangered in the east). There are two regular breeding areas for them in Ontario: the Carden Alvar and the Napanee Plain. And the last I heard, the Ontario population numbered about one hundred.

And once again, habitat destruction is playing a major role in its decline. Is this sounding like a familiar theme yet? And in the past forty years their numbers have declined by 71%. Yup, we’ve finally hit the seventies. Seven more species to go.