Wild Northern Aplomado Falcon

In May of 1995, a blessed event occurred in Cameron County, Texas. Just as the United States Fish and Wildlife Service was telling the world that the Peregrine Falcon was no longer an endangered species, a little white and rusty-brown egg broke apart, and out crawled the first wild northern Aplomado Falcon chick to be hatched in the United States since 1952.

The parents, gorgeously feathered in colors of cinnamon brown and aplomado—the Spanish word for leaden blue—were protective and attentive, feeding their rare child on insects and the flesh of small birds.

The adults came to Texas as two of sixty-two captive-bred Aplomado Falcon chicks, hatched in Idaho and released by Peregrine Fund biologists on the Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in the years 1986 through 1993.

Their nest was the first to be recorded in Texas since 1941.
As fledglings, these graceful predators had survived Great Horned Owls and coyotes to mature, meet, and mate.

Finding a nest of dry grass, twigs, and string built seventy feet above ground on the cross-bars of a three-pole angle structure supporting 138-kilovolt transmission lines, the female Aplomado claimed it as home.