The sound of the crested caracaras’ weird, rattling call—a dry karruk-karruk—lingered in Darwin’s mind, along with the contorted pose they struck as they uttered it, throwing their heads back until they nearly touched their tails. Despite their heraldic appearance, their “necrophagous habits” left him feeling uneasy in the deserts of Patagonia, where “they are very evident to any one who has fallen asleep on the desolate plains,” he wrote, “for when he wakes, he will see, on each surrounding hillock, one of these birds patiently watching him with an evil eye.”
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