Yellow-headed Caracara

About the Yellow-headed Caracara

The Yellow-headed Caracara is a tropical falcon that behaves like anything but - a buffy-headed, dark-backed opportunist of South and Central American ranchland that walks the ground for its living and treats large mammals as mobile feeding stations. The pale head with a dark line behind the eye and the loud, complaining scream make it a familiar roadside character through most of its range.

It is far more scavenger and forager than hunter: carrion, insects kicked up by livestock, frogs, eggs, palm fruits, and ticks picked directly off the backs of cattle and capybaras - a cleaning service the animals visibly tolerate. Quick to exploit burns, mowing, and roadkill, it thrives wherever forest gives way to pasture.

That affinity for cleared land has carried the species steadily northward through Central America and into southern Mexico over recent decades. The United States, though, remains at the far edge of that advance: Yellow-headed Caracara is an extreme rarity here, with only a small handful of accepted Texas records.

The bird photographed here was part of that tiny group of Texas occurrences - a remarkable find for the state, and quite possibly a preview: if the northward march continues, south Texas ranch country looks exactly like the habitat this adaptable falcon has been conquering for a century.