A Caracara Story

byRosanaHart

1.4K followers

2 years ago

After I read this marvelous book, I blogged about it here:
Did You Know That Caracaras Think Like You Do? (wealthyaffiliate.com)

In the normal course of things, I would set the book aside and move on to other books. But this isn't a normal book.

We had it out from the public libary, and my husband was reading it. I soon realized I wanted a copy to keep, so I bought a like-new one. The minute it arrived I began it again. It didn't take me long to gobble up its hundreds of pages. Things fell into place that I hadn't quite picked up on during my first time through. I probably won't reread it for at least another year, but I expect to get to it again for sure.

I'll share one story from the book with you. This is in England, with a caracara who was hatched there. It's in Chapter 5, if you want to follow the story further.

Geoff Pearson, seventy-eight years old, wearing a baseball cap and a maroon sweatshirt that reads FALCONER on the back in gold letters, ducks his head as he opens the door to a walk-in aviary. "Hello, sweetie!" he calls. "Hello, love!"

Inside the enclosure, a scruffy young striated caracara named Evita stands on a branch cut from an oak tree, screaming with excitement. KAOOO! KAOOO! KAOO! she bellows, taking a sip of air between each cry.

It's her eyes that hold you -- huge, dark, curious, forthright. She doesn't look past you with vague disinterest as other birds do; she looks into you, which is charming but also unnerving.

She's the only bird with a desk in her aviary. Geoff closes the door behind him, and Evita screams even louder, with the insistence and volume of a car alarm. "I know, sweetie," he soothes.

Behind his back Geoff holds an object Evita's never seen: a glass bottle with a day-old chicken's head inside, tied to a green string that sticks out of the bottle's mouth like an unlit fuse. Evita seems to know something's up.

Geoff produces the bottle with a flourish, placing it on the desk and steadying it with one hand, and Evita falls silent. Then she takes two running steps down the oak limb and leaps to the desk, her talons clattering on the wood, and leans forward to examine the chicken's head in the bottle. She pecks at the glass.

"This is as far as other kinds of birds would make it," says Geoff.

Evita draws back and studies the bottle. You can sense her absorption; you can almost see gears turning in her head. She paces around it, peering at it from all sides, and places one of her outsized feet on its smooth surface. Geoff lets the bottle shift in his grip. Then Evita grasps the string and lifts, and the chick's head comes closer. She looks at Geoff. "Go on," he says. Then she leans down, takes the string in her beak, and pulls. Out pops the head, and Evita wolfs it down.