[3] The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.

[4] Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Falco americanus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.

[10] This species inhabits the humid lowland forests of Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela.

[12] The diet consists mainly of wasp and bee larvae, though it will eat mature insects and also forage on fruits and berries found in the humid subtropical and tropical lowlands, and mountainous regions of its Central and South American habitat.

After the 1950s, both its population and range rapidly declined in Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, Ecuador, and French Guiana, causing the species to be placed on the World Wildlife endangered list.

Until 2013, very little was known of the red-throated caracara's feeding behavior until a team of Canadian biologists from the University of Simon Fraser spent months researching the birds using camera surveillance at the Nouragues Field Station in French Guiana.

The scientific footage shows the birds using a rapid-fire "fly-by" aerial-diving attack strategy to knock nests down onto the forest floor, while skillfully evading most wasp stings.