‘Shrubs for Shrikes’ Strives to Save Indiana’s Butcherbirds From Going Extinct

One June morning in 2017, Roger Crandall looked out the window of his southern Indiana home to see someone pointing a spotting scope at his pear trees. The stranger in his neighbor’s yard was Amy Kearns, the assistant ornithologist for the state Department of Natural Resources. After a brief introduction, Kearns gave Crandall some unexpected news: His yard was hosting a nesting pair of one of Indiana’s rarest bird species—and he might be able to help protect it.

Crandall, a retired farmer and former teacher, had never heard of a Loggerhead Shrike. But he became intrigued as Kearns showed him pictures of the bandit-masked songbird whose habit of impaling mice and insects on thorns and barbed wire has earned it the nickname “butcherbird.” Then she told him the stakes: After decades of decline, only a handful of pairs still bred in Indiana. His yard and adjacent cattle pasture provided some of the state’s last ideal habitat.

The situation wasn’t always so dire. While never common breeders in Indiana, eastern Loggerhead Shrikes—a genetically distinct population found from Arkansas to Ontario—were once widespread on the small family farms and pastures that dotted the state’s countryside. With their short prairie grasses, abundance of eastern redcedars and other shrubs, and overgrown fencerows, these fields provided shrikes with the hunting grounds, nesting bushes, and impaling sites they need to thrive.

But over time, economic pressures pushed landowners across the country to transform their traditional family farms into more commercial operations where every square foot counted. That meant no more weedy fencerows or shrubs taking up space where crops could be grown—in other words, no more Loggerhead Shrike breeding habitat. Even the loss of one favored shrub can remove a pair of shrikes from the landscape, says Allisyn-Marie Gillet, state ornithologist for the Indiana DNR. “Some of them will nest in the same bush year after year after year,” she notes. “And when it gets cut down, it’s over. They have a hard time finding new places.”

This habitat loss is a key contributor to the shrike’s startling decline across the eastern United States and Canada, says Gillet. Her state hasn’t been spared. Since the late 1980s Indiana’s breeding shrike population has cratered from around 100 known pairs to fewer than 10. And while that decline seems to have ceased, the population remains perilously small. What’s more, almost all remaining shrikes breed on private land, leaving them vulnerable to changes in farming practices.

Throughout the 2010s, Gillet and Kearns did everything they could to encourage the few remaining landowners who hosted the cardinal-sized carnivores to keep their farms shrike-friendly. Several were quite accommodating, even letting the ornithologists onto their property to observe the shrikes and tag birds with individually identifiable color bands. But all too often, farmers simply couldn’t afford to foster shrubs that might limit the space available for growing crops.

By 2019 Gillet and Kearns knew that to keep Loggerhead Shrikes from going extinct in Indiana, they would need a more direct intervention—one that could create and protect habitat while also benefiting landowners. “We wanted to try to incentivize farmers to plant bushes, pay them so that they can perceive the bushes as moneymakers instead of something taking away their money,” says Gillet.

Thus, in 2020, Shrubs for Shrikes was born. A collaboration between the Indiana DNR, the Indiana Audubon Society (which is not affiliated with the National Audubon Society), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program, the initiative helps landowners create and improve shrike habitat by planting at least four eastern redcedar bushes in their fencerows and maintaining them for 10 years. Since the shrike population is so fragile, the shrubs must be at least eight feet tall when planted to make them immediately useful to the birds. This simple effort is enough to immediately transform an unsuitable patch of pasture into perfect butcherbird habitat, says Amy Chabot, a conservation biologist who has studied eastern Loggerhead Shrikes for more than 30 years: “As soon as you put in a nest tree, boom, it’s suitable.”

In exchange for their participation, the landowners receive a stipend to offset the lost productivity. The payments come from a pool of state and federal funds and contributions to the Indiana Audubon Society’s Adopt a Shrike program.

After five years, Shrubs for Shrikes has partnered with 18 landowners to plant 70 eastern redcedars on Indiana farms—including four on Roger Crandall’s land, where the native shrubs supplement his pear trees. It’s too soon to tell whether the program is helping to boost shrike numbers, but early returns are promising: The researchers often observe shrikes hunting from the planted shrubs and using them for cover, and in 2022 a pair nesting in one of them successfully fledged three young. Indiana’s efforts have proven successful enough that states in other parts of the Loggerhead’s range are considering implementing similar programs.

Despite the encouraging initial results, Gillet and Kearns know it will take more to save Indiana’s Loggerhead Shrikes and engage landowners with conservation. For instance, it may be equally important to protect the shrikes’ wintering habitat—but nobody is exactly sure where in the Southeast that is. Hoping to answer that question, the Indiana team is partnering with researchers at Colorado State University on a project that’s analyzing the birds’ genetic makeup to trace their movements. The scientists also hope to investigate how other factors may be affecting Loggerhead Shrikes, including pesticide use and vehicle collisions.

In a bid to make capturing the shrikes easier and more ethical, the Indiana DNR has also teamed up with a group of engineering students at Indiana University to create robotic lures that will replace the live mice researchers typically use to entice the birds. The students—none of whom had heard of shrikes before starting their project—expect to test their prototypes this spring.

No matter where these conservation efforts lead, Gillet emphasizes that, in Indiana and beyond, it will be impossible to protect the species without building a coalition that stretches well past the confines of scientific research. Fortunately, the Hoosier State’s shrikes are making plenty of friends.

This story originally ran in the Spring 2025 issue as “Boost for Butcherbirds.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.