Following up on my book Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore, I have occasionally written about varied speculativepseudohistories of the chupacabra, and indeed the subject is ripe for conjecture.

In a blog titled “The Secret Prehistory of the Chupacabra,” Jason Colavito writes that “the chupacabra name derives from 2,300 years of European and American traditions about nocturnal creatures that prey on livestock. And it all started with a small, completely harmless little bird.”

Colavito notes, correctly in my estimation, that “The first chupacabra was not a monster, nor was it a vampire. Originally, the goatsucker was so named not because the creature sucked blood like a vampire but because it sucked milk directly from the teat. The legend originates in a story told about the European nightjar (genus Caprimulgus), a smallish, nocturnal, and insectivorous bird that inexplicably developed a bad reputation, earning it the name ‘goatsucker.’ The first author to record this story is Aristotle, in his History of Animals, written around 350 BCE.”

So far so good; we agree that a small bird named chupacabra–like a great many birds around the world including owls, ravens, doves, etc.–had folkloric associations, in this case that it suckled goat milk. Where we part ways is in seeing clear links between the subject of my book and the bird of lore. I briefly discuss the goatsucker bird in the first chapter of my book (see page 4). The chupacabra monster is very specifically a vampire: it sucks blood from its victims. The “goat sucker” bird that shares its name instead sucks milk from goats, which is a different theme–there are few reports of surviving chupacabra victims, as the monster’s actions are typically said to be lethal. Also the word chupacabra (as specifically describing the subject of my book) was, from all indications referred specifically to rumors of goats being killed and drained of blood in rural Puerto Rico, not to the milk-drinking whippoorwill bird.

The best evidence is that the word chupacabra was first coined by San Juan-based radio deejay Silverio Pérez in late 1995 live while commenting on then-circulating rumors and tabloid stories about strange attacks on the island. I have been unable to find any pre-1995 references to a blood-sucking chupacabra in Puerto Rico or anywhere else–despite a standing $1,000 reward for any verifiable, published pre-1990s reference to a vampiric chupacabra–and Colavito offers none.

Colavito does an admirable job of tracing the linguistic lineage: “The name, in its now-obsolete Spanish form chotacabra, was in common use in Spanish America (including Puerto Rico) from at least the nineteenth century (and probably many centuries earlier), changing to chupacabra in the twentieth century when the older Spanish verb chotar (to suck) became obsolete and gave way to the newer synonym chupar… the nightjar is native to Puerto Rico, and I have been able to find printed references to the bird on the island as ‘chotacabra’ dating back to at least 1948….The change from the obsolete form chotacabra to the modern form chupacabra, reflecting changes in colloquial Spanish, masked the connection, leading to recent claims that the word did not exist prior to 1995.” Colavito does not account for (or glosses over) the notable absence of chupacabra (as referring to the now-familiar vampiric monster, not the bird) between the time that “chotar” became “chupar” and the eve of this century.

You can read the rest HERE.  And Colavito’s response is HERE. 

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