Aplomado Falcon – Bird Art Print on Wood

This listing is for a limited edition, fine art print of my original painting of an Aplomado Falcon called, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

This handsome fellow will be your super hero and have dinner on the table by the time you get home from a rather long day.

A glimpse into the process…

About the Bird

From our Friends at Audubon:

This trim, elegant falcon once nested in desert grassland of the southwest, but it has been very rare north of the Mexican border since the 1920s or before. Recently a few have reappeared in New Mexico and western Texas, and there has been a major attempt to reintroduce the species in southern Texas.

And a bit more from The Peregrine Fund:

• The Aplomado Falcon was placed on the Endangered Species List in 1986 and is the last falcon in the United States currently on this list.
• The last known wild breeding pair of Aplomado Falcons in the United States was last seen in New Mexico in 1952.
• Aplomado Falcons will hunt together as pairs or in family groups, working together to pursue or flush out their prey.

Where they live

Aplomado Falcons were once found in the southwestern United States including Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, into Central and South America all the way to Chile and Tierra Del Fuego at the southern tip of Argentina. Not too long ago, however, these agile, colorful falcons disappeared from much of their North American range. After 1952, there were no known Aplomado Falcons nesting in the United States – until The Peregrine Fund began reintroducing them into parts of their North American range in the early 1990s. As a result, there is once again a breeding population of Aplomado Falcons in southern Texas.

Aplomado Falcons are adapted to living in open habitats where songbirds and insects abound and where shrubs or trees, including tree yuccas like Spanish Dagger and Soaptree Yucca, are present for nesting. Prime real estate for an Aplomado Falcon includes grasslands, savannas, pastures, and shrub-steppe.

If you are familiar with the landscapes of Central and South America, you know that much of the habitat there is composed of dense neotropical forest, leaving you to wonder what a grassland species is doing in thick forest. After all, it is not the best place for an Aplomado Falcon to survive. The answer is that in these regions, this small raptor is found only in select pockets of open habitat where it can sometimes be seen flying swiftly across pastures or perched on fence posts and telephone poles. Aplomado Falcons have been found living at elevations as high as 12,000 feet in the Andes Mountains from Colombia to Argentina.