Happy weekend, fellow kids. This week’s bird is the crested caracara. It is a large member of the falcon family found throughout central and south America, with recent sightings far north into the US and Canada. There is a population in Florida which is a glacial relict, isolated from the rest of the population for the last 12,000 years or so. Before the end of the last ice age, the entire gulf coast was an “oak savannah,” open grassland where oaks were the dominant species of tree. This is the kind of landscape the crested caracara prefers throughout its range. As the ice age wound down and the climate changed, the Florida population, largely in the central part of the state, was left isolated.
The caracara is an opportunistic carnivore that will hunt a wide variety of small animals, but more often feed on carrion. Once again we find a hierarchy of birds, the crested caracara “outranks” and will chase away black and turkey vultures from their meal. It will also steal food from other animals, I’ve got a dramatic photo of this posted below. It will also, and this is my favorite, chase and harry other birds until they vomit up their meal for the caracara to eat. The caracara will hunt wildlife disturbed by farming equipment, wildfires or larger animals, and is known to follow cars and trains hoping to catch discarded food. Due to its impromptu feeding style, it will follow fires or circling vultures hoping to score a meal. It flies low over the ground and often walks.
Like at least one other bird we have covered here, the crested caracara has benefitted from deforestation, as more open land creates more opportunities for its style of hunting/food appropriation. The good news here is that the bird is common throughout its range and is rated “of least concern” on a scale of “extinct” to “least concern.” The Florida population, however, is considered threatened.
This bird has a long history in Mexico, and while it is a national icon, it is not the eagle on the flag. To wit: “Mexican ornithologist Rafael Martín del Campo proposed that the northern caracara was possibly the sacred “eagle” depicted in several pre-Columbian Aztec codices, as well as the Florentine Codex. This imagery was adopted as a national symbol of Mexico, but it is not the bird depicted on the flag, which is a golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), the national bird.[25]“
Be good to each other, grab a mod if things get heated, and if you get caught hog poggling, don’t let anyone know I said it was cool.
Links: https://tinyurl.com/8stx4bv7, https://tinyurl.com/285zh67s, https://tinyurl.com/3tmsn6xd, https://tinyurl.com/3zny64yj
