The loggerhead shrike may look like any other songbird you might see at a backyard feeder, but its soft exterior masks the heart of a killer.

“It really is a bird of prey trapped in the songbirds body,” said Michelle Reynolds, an amateur bird-watcher and artist from Birmingham who has become obsessed with the shrikes.

For the second installment of AL.com’s weird Alabama animal series, we move from the brilliantly colored rainbow snake to an average-looking bird whose milquetoast appearance disguises the fact that it gets its jollies hanging dead animals on fences to save them for later.

Reynolds first encountered the shrikes on a birding excursion to Dauphin Island with her mother and was captivated by the beautiful birds and their bizarre behavior.

“They perch on wires and in the tops of trees and look through their black mask and look for prey and then they pounce on them and shake them to death and impale them on thorns or barbed wire,” Reynolds said.

The shrikes are known to eat pretty much whatever they can fit in their beaks, from insects to smaller birds, rodents, frogs, snakes, bats and sometimes even food made for people. The shrikes have even been documented taking down other birds that weigh more than they do.

“I found a meadowlark and I found a starling and then also blue birds and white-throated sparrows [on barbed wire],” Reynolds said. “But the meadowlark and the starling are definitely heavier than the shrikes.”

Reynolds said there’s a group of shrikes she visits regularly in Birmingham, off Finley Avenue, and she’ll see all kinds of items stuck along a razor-wire fence that surrounds an empty brownfield property at one of the city’s old industrial plots.

“Sometimes I’ll find chicken nuggets on the razor wire, chicken bones,” Reynolds said. “I’ve found fried fish, and a piece of Texas toast and half of a mouse and lots of bees and caterpillars and cicadas all kinds of gory things.”

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The loggerhead shrike is the only member of its family endemic to North America, and is naturally found in grassland habitats across much of the United States.

Reynolds, since discovering the unusual birds, has become a member of the “shrike force,” a working group of bird watchers and biologists that document the birds across North America. The group is trying to gain more information about possibly declining numbers of shrikes, as their grassland habitat dwindles.

“These are not city birds, and I’m always amazed to find them in the city eking out a living in miniature grasslands, brownfields and industrial yards,” Reynolds said. “Shrikes are grassland birds on the decline as many grassland species are, and so it is always surprising to see how adaptable they are to man-made structures and habitats.”

She also said the birds are beautiful if you look past the corpses.

“They’re really handsome birds,” she said. “They’re gray with a white belly and they have black and white on their wings and then the black mask that looks like a superhero and they’re just cool-looking birds.”

But she’s still mostly in it for the macabre.

“I mainly like to go see all the dead stuff on the barbed wire,” Reynolds said. “I like the morbid side. I don’t know why, but I guess just driving through the country and looking at the barbed wire and finding something stuck to it, it’s just intriguing. What put it there? Where is this bird? I just have to stop and look.”