On Mon, 22 Aug 1994, Dennis Paulson wrote:

> I have to comment on Gene's story about the black-crowned night-heron. If
> anyone still wishes to put human titles on other animals, you could get by
> with calling black-crowned night-herons "evil." Perhaps because their

All this blood-and-guts has been fun to read, and I wasn't going to add
to it because I figured there were a bazillion such stories out there, we
could all talk for years about them. But this line about putting human
names to birds really got me thinking. Not about herons, or evil, but
about jaegars. Now I know that Falconiforms have evolved for millions of
years to play the predatory role that they do now. And many of us think
of them as the epitome of avian predators. I used to, but not after I
watched jaegars hunting. Many of you may respond to that with comments
like 'please, they're just fancy gulls', or 'he's probably never seen
a peregrine catch something, that would change his mind'. But neither
statement is true, and I think if I were to put a label on jaegars it would
be 'stealth', 'intelligence', and 'persistence'.

In the summer of 1991 I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work on
some research projects in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. All 3 jaegars occur there
at one time or another, and Parasitics nest there in decent numbers every
year. The other 2 species have nested there, but sparingly. The
Parasitics were the subject of most of my observations. Now, to be
totally honest, there were times when the jaegars would wait while we ate
lunch (obviously others had fed them before), just like their Larus
cousins down here. But the times that they really impressed me was in
the late summer, when they took to feeding on the large flocks of staging
shorebirds, catching almost entirely juveniles. I witnessed the entire
procession on three different occasions, with 3 different prey species:
Stilt Sandpiper, Red Phalarope, and Long-billed Dowitcher. They work in
pairs (presumably mates?), flying low and fast over the tundra, not more
than 2 feet off the ground. I swear the black-morph Parasitic Jaegars
must have been the inspiration for the Stealth aircraft. They were on
the flocks before they could react, and would single out a bird to kill.
Typical shorebird escape flights are zig-zag, which presumably tires out
the predator. But the jaegars are ahead of the game here, with one of
the pair right on the shorebird's butt the whole time, the other lagging
back and flying straight-line through the flight path. They would swap
positions after a short while, and eventually the shorebird was caught
with the bill, and taken down and devoured by the pair. The whole thing
took less than 45 seconds. The speed and the agility shown by the jaegars
as they pursued these shorebirds was inspiring and awesome, even more
than watching falcons pull ducks out of mid-air. Maybe it's because you
expect it from falcons, that's how they live. But a jaegar sitting on
the ground does like much like a gull, hardly what you'd think of as a
gruesome predator.

Well, this is now much longer than it should be. The jaegars also
outsmarted us several times, following behind us where we couldn't see
them, only to come down and consume the contents of the nest we had just
found, or catching the fledgeling longspurs that we would sometimes
flush. All in all, I believe jaegars are a most impressive predator.

Mike Smith
University of Washington
whimbrel at u.washington.edu