Wildlife: A Young Yellow-Header Caracara Looks For Food In The Jungles Of Panama Stock Photo

The yellow-headed caracara Milvago chimachima is a bird of prey in the family Falconidae. It is found in tropical and subtropical South America and the southern portion of Central America. Unlike the falcons in the same family, the caracara is not a fast-flying aerial hunter, but is rather sluggish and often obtains food by scavenging. This is a bird of savanna, swamps and forest edges. In southern South America, it is replaced by a close relative, the chimango caracara, whose range overlaps with that of the yellow-headed caracara in southern Brazil, northern Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. A larger and stouter paleosubspecies, Milvago chimachima readei, occurred in Florida and possibly elsewhere some tens of thousand years ago, during the Late Pleistocene. According to the Peregrine Fund database, the yellow-headed caracara is expanding its range into Nicaragua. The yellow-headed caracara is omnivorous, and will eat reptiles, amphibians and other small animals as well as carrion. Birds are rarely if ever taken, and this species will not elicit warning calls from mixed-species feeding flocks that cross its path even in open habitat. It will also take ticks from cattle, and is sometimes called the tickbird. It has been observed also to forage for small invertebrates in the fur of brown-throated three-toed sloths and capybaras. It lays from five to seven brown-marked buff eggs in a stick nest in a tree.