Aplomado Falcon

About the Aplomado Falcon

The Aplomado Falcon is the most elegant falcon in North America - slim and long-tailed, slate above with a bold white eyebrow and dark "sideburns", a creamy chest crossed by a blackish cummerbund, and rich rufous below. "Aplomado" is Spanish for lead-colored, for that gunmetal back.

It is a falcon of open grassland with scattered yuccas and mesquites, hunting birds, insects, lizards, and rodents with a mix of dashing pursuit and clever opportunism - pairs regularly hunt as a team, one bird flushing prey into the other's path, and they shamelessly follow fires and tractors for the fleeing insects. Rather than building nests they take over old stick nests of ravens and caracaras.

The species vanished from the United States by the mid-1900s as coastal prairie and desert grassland went under the plow, leaving it only in Latin America. A decades-long reintroduction effort begun in the 1980s and 90s released hundreds of captive-bred falcons on the Texas coast, and a small breeding population now persists on the coastal prairies around Laguna Atascosa and Matagorda Island, with a separate remnant in west Texas.

Seeing an Aplomado in Texas usually means slowly driving the coastal prairie roads of the lower coast, scanning yucca tops and power poles. Every bird here descends from, or fought its way back alongside, one of the great raptor-restoration projects in American history.