Striated caracara

 Name: Striated Carcara, Johnny Rook, Caracara Austral, Matamico Estriado, Matamico Grande, Tiuque Cordillerano Austral. (Phalcoboenus australis)

Length: 60 cm.

Weight: 1.2 kg

Location: Falklands, Tierra del Fuego.

Conservation status: Near Threatened.

Diet: Carrion, offal, food scraps, insects, worms, lambs, small seabirds, eggs and young of larger seabirds.

Appearance: Eagle-like, dark brown plumage, grey-yellow legs and talons. White tips around neck, back of head, and tips of tail feathers. Yellow patches around bottom of eye and rear of beak. Hooked grey bill.

How do Striated Caracaras feed?

Striated Caracaras are opportunistic – they’ll feed on almost anything they can. They’ll eat the young and eggs of seabirds, and hunt smaller seabirds in their burrows or on the wing.

They will investigate human refuse for food and will eat offal. They will scavenge carcasses.

They’re also known for overturning rocks for food which is a sign of higher intelligence in birds – it’s a form of adaptation and problem-solving.

Are Striated Caracaras social?

Striated Caracaras may hunt together in flocks numbering up to 50 individuals.

How fast do Striated Caracaras move?

Striated Caracaras are fast fliers and can reach speeds in excess of 60 km per hour.

What are Striated Caracara birthing rituals like?

Striated Caracaras build their nests on the ground or on cliff edges. The nests are built of twigs and vegetation, which is thin lined with wool or grass. The breeding season occurs from December through the end of February. The female lays up to four eggs. Incubation takes about a month.

The births are timed to coincide with the birthing season of prey seabirds. This gives the parents easy access to food for their young, and for the young themselves once they leave the nest.

The juveniles’ coverage is brown at first and will take up to 5 years to reach its adult colouring.

How long do Striated Caracaras live?

It’s not known how long Striated Caracaras live in the wild but those raised in captivity can live more than 30 years.

How many Striated Caracaras are there today?

There are approximately 500 breeding pairs of Striated Caracaras found in the Falklands. Overall there may be up to 2500 mature individuals, or up to 4,000 individuals in total.

Do Striated Caracaras have any natural predators?

Striated Caracaras do not have any significant natural predators. The biggest threat they have faced is from sheep farmers who began an intensive effort to exterminate them from the Falklands in 1908. Thankfully this decision was reversed in the 1920s, though the population has still not fully recovered to its former levels.7 Superb Striated Caracara Facts

They are known to steal red objects like hats of gloves. This might be because the red colouring makes them think the object is meat.

Striated Caracaras were once intensively hunted in the Falklands because they were such a menace to the local sheep farmers. However they are now protected by law and cannot be killed without permission from the Falklands government.

Striated Caracaras have the southernmost distribution of birds of prey in the world.

Striated Caracaras are quite curious and show little fear of humans. Charles Darwin first found that he could catch them with just a hand-net. This curiosity might actually serve an evolutionary trait – it helps them discover new ways to find sources of food.

Striated Caracaras are the largest of the genus Phalcoboenus.

Striated Caracaras are only found on islands where there are also populations of seals or seabirds.

Striated Caracaras are one of the world’s rarest forms of raptor.

Club-winged Manakin

Club-winged Manakin

The Club-winged Manakin (Machaeropterus deliciosus) is a resident breeder in the cloud forest on the western slopes of the Andes Mountains of Colombia and northwestern Ecuador in South America.

Wings & Sound

The really cool part about this bird is that the males produce a violin-like sound in order to attract the females with their wings. Kind of like how crickets use wings to chirp!

According to a Cornell University ornithologist in the July 29 issue of Science, male club-winged manakins use specially adapted feathers in each wing to make a tone – much like a cricket chirping by rubbing together sound-making apparatus in its wings.

This sound makes the male more attractive to the females.

“Essentially an instrument has evolved in this species, in this case a refined instrument,” said Kimberly Bostwick, the paper’s lead author, a curator in the birds and mammals division of Cornell’s Museum of Vertebrates and a research associate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Description

The colorful males of the species have brownish-red feathers, a bright red crown, and black and white wings. The less colorful females are mainly a yellow-green color.

The males of this species gather in an area in order to try and attract the attention of the females. The females mate with their chosen male, and then leave the mating area in order to build a nest and raise the young. The males don’t raise the young, they mainly stick around where they were before, trying to attract the next female. As you can tell, these birds don’t pair up for life.

They average 2.5 cm or 4.9 inches in length, from beak to tip of tail.

Diet

Club-winged Manakins mainly eat fruit but may sometimes supplement their diet with insects. In fact, they can open up their beaks quite a bit, so much so that they can swallow fruits quite large in size. In return for getting much-needed nutrition from the plants they depend on, these birds effectively disperse the seeds of the fruits they eat and, thus, help regenerate their own food supply in the process.

Breeding / Nesting

The average clutch consists of two eggs, which are incubated for 18 to 21 days.

Northern Lapwing

Northern Lapwing: Large, unique plover with black breast, face, crown, and long upright head plumes; back is green-tinged purple and copper. Belly and sides are white, uppertail is white with a black tip, and undertail coverts are rich rufous-orange. Wings are dark with white tips; legs are pink. Sexes are similar. Winter adult shows less black on face and has white edges on dark back feathers. Juvenile resembles winter adult but has fine spots on dark back, and shorter head plumes.

Range and Habitat

Northern Lapwing: This species is found in a wide variety of open areas with bare ground or low grasses. It is widespread in Europe and Asia; this bird occasionally wanders in the autumn to eastern Newfoundland and Labrador, extreme eastern Quebec, and the northeastern United States from Maine to Maryland.

Breeding and Nesting

Northern Lapwing: Breeds in a wide variety of open habitats ranging from wetlands to pastures and old fields. Lays four or five brown eggs with black markings that are primarily incubated by the female for 26 to 28 days. Chicks are independent soon after hatching but are guarded by one or both parents.

Foraging and Feeding

Northern Lapwing: Feeds in open fields and areas of bare ground, where it hunts for insects and small invertebrates by sight. Will run a few steps, pause and probe in ground, run a few steps.

Vocalization

Northern Lapwing: Call is a plaintive whistle “peewit.”

Similar Species

Northern Lapwing: Rare vagrant and unlikely to be confused with any species in North America.

Where and when to see them

Lapwings are found on farmland throughout the UK particularly in lowland areas of northern England, the Borders and eastern Scotland. In the breeding season prefer spring sown cereals, root crops, permanent unimproved pasture, meadows and fallow fields. They can also be found on wetlands with short vegetation. In winter they flock on pasture and ploughed fields. The highest known winter concentrations of lapwings are found at the Somerset Levels, Humber and Ribble estuaries, Breydon Water/Berney Marshes, the Wash and Morecambe Bay.

.