I'm dashing back to Hastings as my friend has emailed me, ..... on two
occasions, he has gone out to his washing line to bring his clothes in to
find the head and neck of a small lizard/skink jammed into the tines section
of a wooden clothes peg. He says he saw a buthcherbird doing the deed. What
is the best way of ensuring that this gets accepted as being an occurance?
I suspect these things are connected, to which I wrote back to John:
This seems like a typical thing for a
butcherbird. There is nothing new or astounding about it. More to the point,
other things don't do this. That is where the name comes from, hanging meat
on hooks, like a butcher. The shrikes of northern hemisphere do the same.
The thing is, they don't have strong feet like hawks have, so they need to
secure prey on something, while they tear it up.
Philip
