When I wrote that yellow-headed caracaras pick ticks off of mammals Dr. Tony Bledsoe pointed out that, based on the similar behavior of an African bird, it’s possible the caracaras are also drinking the animals’ blood.

Ewww!  What gives?

In Africa, there are birds called oxpeckers (two species in genus Buphagus: yellow-billed and red-billed) that also perch on mammals and eat ticks, lice, fleas, and biting flies found on the animals’ skin.  Studies have shown that individual oxpeckers eat up to 100 engorged ticks or 13,000 nymphs per day.  Quite a benefit to the animal!

Engorged ticks contain tiny blood meals so it’s not a big leap that the oxpeckers sometimes to go directly to the blood source, pecking and plucking at an animal’s wounds.  Despite this parasitic and perhaps painful behavior, many mammals tolerate the oxpeckers although elephants and some antelopes shoo them off when they land.

Yellow-headed caracaras are unrelated to oxpeckers but their tick-eating behavior extends to blood meals as well. The Handbook of the Birds of the World includes this remark about the caracara’s eating habits:

“Perches on cattle and Capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) to pick off ticks; picks flesh from open wounds on backs of cattle, which often seem oddly indifferent to the process.”

It sounds gruesome but the benefits of having your own portable tick-remover apparently outweigh the occasional blood meal.

(photos from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the original)

There’s a bird of prey in South America that likes to raid wasp nests to eat the larvae.  The problem is that red-throated caracaras (Ibycter americanus) have bare skin on their faces and throats, an easy target for stinging wasps.

How do the birds get the larvae without a lot of pain?  Do they chemically repel the wasps?

In 2013, Canadian Sean McCann and colleagues studied red-throated caracaras in French Guiana on the north coast of South America.  They learned that, no, the birds don’t repel the wasps.  The caracaras are attacked but they compensate in other ways.

Watch the video to see how the birds nab their tasty meal.  They know something about wasp behavior that we had been ignoring.

Click here to read more in their PLOS ONE paper, Strike Fast, Strike Hard, or here at ibycter.com.

(video from YouTube)

20 January 2016

This week I blogged about a caracara on a capybara but I didn’t tell you much about the bird.  Why was the bird standing on the mammal?  Hint: The falcon’s nickname is “tickbird.”

Yellow-headed caracaras (Milvago chimachima) are omnivorous members of the falcon family who live in south-Central and South America.  They eat almost anything — carrion, frogs, fish, eggs, palm fruit, corn, horse dung — but when it comes to feeding their young they focus a lot on insects.  90% of the nestlings’ diet consists of beetles, grasshoppers and crickets.

They earned their nickname “tickbirds” because they also glean ticks off of cattle and other mammals, including capybaras.  Above, a juvenile yellow-faced caracara cleans a cow.  The cattle don’t mind, even when the caracaras pick at open wounds.

Yellow-headed caracaras have adapted well as the forest is converted to ranches and cities.  You’d never guess from this video that their nickname is The Tickbird.

(videos from YouTube)