Crested Caracara on Cacti

The crested caracara is a falcon, a member of Falconidae alongside the peregrine and the kestrel. It behaves very little like one. Much of its day is spent on the ground, walking and running on long legs, flipping over dung, stones and debris to get at insects. Its talons are blunt and only weakly curved, without the deep hook a peregrine uses to strike birds out of the air, and it puts its feet to work turning things over.

The bare orange-red face and the taste for carrion look like vulture equipment, and that resemblance is coincidence. Phylogenetic work by Fuchs, Johnson and Mindell in 2012 places caracaras in a falcon lineage whose closest living relatives are parrots and songbirds, further from hawks, eagles and New World vultures than the shared habits suggest.

A caracara's bill cannot open a thick hide, so at a large carcass it often waits for Black or Turkey Vultures to make the first cuts, then pushes in and displaces them. A 2025 review in the Journal of Raptor Research describes the pattern: dominant at small carcasses, subordinate at big ones, and a persistent thief the rest of the time, including one documented case of a caracara taking prey from a peregrine falcon.