by Gregory McNamee
Fifteen years ago, having slaughtered eight sheep in a fold in Puerto Rico, a hitherto unknown creature winged its way across the Caribbean, landed in Mexico, and stealthily made its way northward to the United States, leaving mutilated livestock and poultry in its wake.This creature bears no scientific name. Instead, it is known by the Spanish term chupacabra, or “goatsucker,” overlapping in folklore and ornithology with the birds known as the Caprimulgidae, or nightjars, which, classical mythology held, stole down from the skies at night to take milk from herds of resting goats and sheep.
The chupacabra bears no scientific name because no scientist has ever actually seen one. By the accounts of those who non-scientists who say they have, however, the chupacabra looks something like a mix between a medium-sized terrestrial mammal—a dingo, say—and a bird. Said a Mexican search-and-rescue worker who spotted it at a reservoir near Agua Prieta, Sonora, in a splendid example of non-Linnaean classification, it was “like a turkey or a kangaroo, but it had a beak because it flew.” Other reports give it a larger size and a more pronouncedly avian form; one 1996 report from southern Arizona, for instance, said that a sighted chupacabra had a wingspan of 8 to 10 feet, a beak size of 2 feet, and a height of 5 feet.
Keep that latter description in mind—and never mind that a bird with such a mismatch between beak and height would probably have significant balance problems, for even toucans are a little better proportioned. The fact remains that almost all sightings of the creature give it the power to fly.
That accounts for its ability to leave Puerto Rico, where it has been well attested in the oral tradition, and wing its way to other islands in the Caribbean—always Spanish-speaking islands, it should be noted, for the chupacabra is a stranger to English-speaking venues such as Jamaica and the French- and Dutch-speaking islands of the Antilles.
Whispers of that folkloric creature had made their way to the mainland before, and even to Spanish-speaking communities in the United States, where, in some instances, the story collided with other tales of “cryptid” animals such as the Jersey Devil. When I first reported on chupacabras some 15 years ago, one man I spoke with in Nogales, on the border of Arizona and Mexico, remembered that when he was growing up in the 1960s, he and his friends would scare each other with stories of a chupacabra-like creature that had, yes, wings, but otherwise a morphology befitting a very large kangaroo rat. As with the Mexican search-and-rescue worker, many earlier reports promoted the kangaroo rat to a full-blown kangaroo, a creature native to the antipodean regions and certainly a stranger to all but the zoos of the region.
Even so, the mutant kangaroo is a folkloric trope of many years’ standing. In 1934, Tennesseans scared themselves silly with reports of a blood-drinking, arboreal kangaroo that had somehow made its way to the Volunteer State, reports that slowly quieted down—but only after the deaths of several hunting dogs were attributed to it.
Just so, cowboys in Arizona reported a plague of pterodactyl attacks on cattle and humans back in the 1890s, and many accounts of chupacabras give them a reptilian quality to fit. Add to that description other creepy attributes, including greenish-gray skin and a terrible odor, and the chupacabra becomes a most unpleasant specimen indeed.
Like all folklore, the tall-tale tradition of Spanish North America is full of creatures and beings whose existence, it seems, is meant to keep children safe. La Llorona, the spectral woman who steals children away, lives in river bottoms—and any sensible child will therefore stay away from those places. El Tiradito, the chopped-up murder victim whose pieces lie scattered over a swath of hundreds of miles, was distributed courtesy of the railroad—and any sensible child will thus keep clear of the railroad tracks lest El Tiradito come along to perform his scary duties.
El Chupacabra seems to have no such educational function, unless it be to urge people of all ages to stay indoors at night and away from goat pens and chicken coops. But it also would seem to have a basis in fact, for superstition is science without an autoclave. Just a couple of months ago, Barry O’Connor, a biologist at the University of Michigan who has long been studying the phenomenon, advanced the hypothesis that the chupacabra type was in reality an unfortunate example of what happens when a coyote or coyote/dog hybrid suffers from a particularly nasty form of mange.
The itch or scabies mite, or Sarcoptes scabiei, an aggressive arthropod, burrows into the skin of a victim, which proceeds to lose its hair. The skin often takes on that greenish-grayish pallor and is torn by suppurating lesions, lending a frightful reek to the poor creature, which is often left too weak to pursue its normal prey of rabbits and other rodents, forcing it to resort to attacking livestock instead. Indeed, reports of chupacabra attacks in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico almost always resolve in the discovery of afflicted coyotes. Naked, hairless, and all the worse for the wear, the creatures can even resemble very small kangaroos.
O’Connor’s theory has great explanatory power. The only problem with it, apart from its failing to connect with the whole business of flying, is that it robs folklore of its mystery. But it makes very good sense. Furthermore, it makes very good sense that the chupacabra story should be associated with the deaths of livestock, which in reality is most often the doing not of Satanists, ETs, or monsters but of feral dogs and coyotes, less often of mountain lions and wolves.
“Anglo-Americans have mysterious stock killings, too,” the eminent Southwestern folklorist James Griffith told me when the chupacabra first arrived in Arizona, “and we often wind up attributing them to Satanic cults and such. We’re comfortable with the notion of things among us that look like us, but are not us. People in Mexico and Puerto Rico, I think, are more comfortable with the idea of a mysterious animal.”
Thus the chupacabra, a scary creature in legend, though a pitiable one in reality.