Adult aplomado perches next to a raven's nest that it has commandeered on an abandoned 

 windmill, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Falcons do not build their own nests. 



the birds gray back, and ignores the beautiful cinna- 

 mon-orange markings on its head and belly. 



Early naturalists did admire the aplomado s color- 

 ful markings and yellow-rimmed eyes. Yet, these 

 "admirers" hardly countered the bird's relative 

 anonymity by also describing it as rather phlegmat- 

 ic and an unexciting predator. According to their 

 descriptions, the aplomado would perch quietly for 

 long periods in trees or on fence posts; or, it would 

 follow grass fires to catch escaping grasshoppers and 

 other small prey flushed out ahead of the conflagra- 

 tion. Had any of them seen the bird in hunting mode? 



Only the ornithologist and artist Andrew Jack- 

 son Grayson, traveling in Mexico in the 1860s, 

 seems to have observed aplomado falcons closely 

 enough to fathom their true nature. He watched 

 them chase doves and other medium-size birds — 

 and came away impressed by their spectacular fly- 

 ing and hunting tactics. He thought them not un- 

 like the sharp-shinned hawk, another accipiter. 

 Grayson was right; the assumption that the aplo- 

 mado is an unremarkable hunter is as far from the 

 truth as a newborn tundra peregrine is from its fu- 

 ture wintering grounds in Argentina. 



No records indicate that French or Spanish fal- 

 coners of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 

 knew of a bird by the name aplomado. But they did 

 train a small falcon, known to the French as alethe 

 and to the Spanish as aletto, that came from the New 



World. Early conquistadors and explorers had en- 

 countered the bird in Mexico and Central and South 

 America, recognized its abilities, and brought it back 

 to European falconry centers in France, Spain, and 

 Portugal. In a famous popular treatise, La Fancon- 

 neric, first published in 1598, the aristocrat Charles 

 d'Arcussia wrote of hunting gray partridges with the 

 New World falcon. He favorably compared the alethe 

 to the gyrfalcon and goshawk, for its direct flights 

 from the falconer's glove. D'Arcussia also referred to 

 the bird as "high-mettled" and full of spirit. 



In 1995 James W. Nelson, a falconer from Ken- 

 newick, Washington, studied those historical de- 

 scriptions of behavior and appearance. He had, at 

 that point, also carefully studied the hunting behav- 

 ior of wild aplomados. The alethe, the aletto, and 

 the aplomado, he declared, were one and the same. 



Back in 1976, a young graduate student in biol- 

 ogy, Dean P. Keddy-Hector, then at Oklahoma 

 State University in Stillwater, made the first attempt 

 to scientifically study the behavior and ecology of 

 the aplomado species. He drove down the coast of 

 eastern Mexico to look for them, not being certain 

 that there were any falcons left to study. At the time, 

 Mexican farmers were still dusting their crops with 

 the chemical pesticide DDT — the bane of falcon 

 reproduction because it thins their eggshells. By 

 then, the destruction of the aplomados' natural habi- 



NATURAL HISTORY May 2006 



