This week the rare bird gods were feeling generous, granting me two hard to believe bird stories in the region. One is so ridiculous it sounds more like a Disney movie than an actual rare bird occurrence, complete with an unlikely friendship between a bird and a dog – I’m not making that up- but that one will have to wait. This week I’ll tackle the oddball tropical bird of prey that turned up in a place known more for rare seabirds from around the world.
Local seabird expert Peter Flood was doing one of his weekend vigils out at Race Point in Provincetown on Saturday and seeing some of the usual summer suspects – a few shearwaters, Wilson’s Storm-Petrels, Common, Roseate, and Least Terns. It was a slow morning by Race Point standards until he noticed a kerfuffle among the loafing gulls – suddenly, they all took flight. He surmised the cause was a Bald Eagle, generally the only bird intimidating enough to rouse the large gulls. In his notes he said, with his usual deadpan humor, that the cause was “just a Crested Caracara”.
The furthest north they breed is Central Florida, plus Texas and Arizona, then south all the way to the southern tip of South America. No populations migrate, making caracaras unlikely to show up far from these areas. In fact, Crested Caracaras were unreported in Massachusetts until one turned up in some farm fields in Middleboro back in January of 1999. The sighting and time of year were deemed so unlikely that the powers that be in the Mass Avian Records Committee determined it must have been a captive bird. The birder who found it was so devastated that he essentially withdrew from the birding community, only to have the record later readjudicated and accepted. Since then there have been five other records of the species in MA, three in 2015 alone, all on the Cape or South Coast.
Crested Caracaras are indeed oddballs – supposedly they are falcons, though they have rounded wings 4 feet across, long legs like a hawk, a blue and orange bill like a toucan, and hang out with vultures. This latter habit has given them a reputation as primarily a scavenger, but they eat literally everything – bird eggs and young, reptiles, mammals, insects, fruit. They mostly forage on foot and even walk around with sandpipers picking invertebrates from mud flats. But you get caught eating roadkill a few times and it’s hard to shake that reputation. And no offense to the taxonomists and other DNA jockeys, but the fact that they don’t look, act, or eat like a falcon may mean that they’re not actually a falcon, even if related. Call me crazy.
I looked at recent records of vagrant caracaras in northeastern North America and found several scattered, seemingly random records way up in Eastern and maritime Canada just this year, many in the last month. Looking at the dates, I noticed a pattern, a counterclockwise swirl starting in Prince Edward Island in late June, then progressing around Quebec and heading southeast, seemingly on a course to intercept Race Point – could this just be one peripatetic bird? Alas, one was seen in Quebec the same day as the Race Point bird, killing my single bird theory.
But how many are there, and why are so many of these sedentary birds roaming around at least 1500 miles from home? It’s not just them – their cousins, the ever more southerly Yellow-headed Caracara had never been seen north of Guatemala just four years ago, but now there are several US records as far north as Delaware. Again, what is going on with these birds all of a sudden?
I actually think I figured it out – caracaras are coming north to find the bird taxonomists, who will be hunched over their DNA samples in some university basement, at which point the caracaras will administer dope slaps and say “do I look like a falcon to you?”
