#stercorarius

Antarctic Skua aka Brown Skua (Stercorarius antarcticus) raising a major ruckus, family Stercorariidae, order, Charadriiformes, Falkland Islands

today we have quite the interesting critter - the long-tailed skua, known in North America as the long-tailed jaeger. the littlest member of the skua family, which is a small and rather remarkable clade. if you're a regular on the zoology-oriented portions of the internet, their reputation may well precede them - there's a good reason they're called jaegers! the word is German for "hunter", but even that's a bit of a light word in my opinion. the family is well known for being active and very prolific thieves of other birds' prey, eggs, and even chicks. they're also extremely well traveled, even as pelagic birds go!

our bird today regularly crosses the equator in its search for the most productive stretches of sea. here, it continues its streak of bad behavior, chasing other seabirds until they drop their catch. kleptoparasitism makes up the majority of its diet, in fact. it's as close to a pirate as a bird can get. its yearly nomadic roaming of the oceans can take it as far south as Antarctica before it returns north - its breeding grounds are exclusively in the extreme northern stretches of North America, Europe, and Asia.

here, while it may sometimes dabble in its habitual thievery, most of its diet is made up of voles and lemmings. should the breeding season roll around, only for the jaegers to find lemmings scarce, they don't even bother, simply returning to sea. in years where the jaegers do breed, they are in fact excellent parents, in stark contrast to their nest-robbing habits. they fiercely defend their nests, often hovering far above them in search of any would-be threats, and their chicks are well fed on rodents and other calorie-dense foods.

12 June 2026