LAUGHING FALCONThe other day I was sitting behind the workers' hut stringing sea-beans and bamboo sections to form a kind of curtain when behind me, out in the hurricane-mangled mangroves, I heard a loud, nasal WAH WAH WAH. A white raptor perched conspicuously on a snag jutting above the mangroves and stayed there until I got my camera. You can see the resulting picture of a truly handsome bird below:
That's a Laughing Falcon, HERPETOTHERES CACHINNANS, and you'll understand why it has that name if your computer can digest WAV audio files, and you point your browser to http://www.naturesongs.com/lafa3.wav. If you can't do that, imagine a big crow mimicking a fat, jovial man breaking into unrestrained belly- laughter, and that's it. Howell refers to it in A Guide to the Birds of Mexico and Northern Central America, as maniacal laughter. Some raptor species are hard to distinguish from others, but Laughing Falcons are distinctive and unmistakable. Also, they're fairly common in a variety of habitats ranging from forests to savannas, and they're distributed from Mexico to Argentina, so this is another of those species "emblematic" of the American tropics. |
