Orange-breasted falcon

Orange-breasted falcon
Orange-breasted falcon at Chapada dos Guimarães, Mato Grosso State, Brazil
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Falconiformes
Family: Falconidae
Genus: Falco
Species: F. deiroleucus
Binomial name
Falco deiroleucus
Temminck, 1825

The orange-breasted falcon (Falco deiroleucus) is a bird of the falcon family. It is probably closely related to and looks like a larger version of the bat falcon. These two, in turn, are probably closest to the aplomado falcon and constitute a rather old American lineage of Falcos.[2]

Falco deiroleucus adult and juvenile, illustration, 1902

It is found from southern Mexico to northern Argentina. It's a medium-sized falcon at 35–40 cm (14–16 in) long and a weight of 325–700 grams (11.5 oz.-1.5 lbs).[3] It is a bird predator, with strong talons that enable it to catch prey in flight, and is considered by some –such as the German-Brazilian ornithologist Helmut Sick – as filling the ecological niche of the peregrine falcon as a breeding species in tropical America. The orange-breasted falcon, however, seems to favor more heavily wooded habitats than the peregrine, therefore the species does not seem to be in ecological competition with peregrine falcons wintering or breeding in South America. The orange-breasted falcon has a similar plumage to the much smaller bat falcon and is generally considered most closely related to that species now.

Footnotes

  1. BirdLife International (2012). "Falco deiroleucus". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2013.2. International Union for Conservation of Nature. Retrieved 26 November 2013.
  2. Probably diverging from their relatives some 8-5 million years ago, during the Late Miocene. See Birregard (1994), Helbig et al. (1994), Wink et al. (1998), Griffiths (1999), Groombridge et al. (2002), Griffiths et al. (2004)
  3. Identification – Orange-breasted Falcon (Falco deiroleucus) – Neotropical Birds. Neotropical.birds.cornell.edu. Retrieved on 2013-03-07.

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Thursday, April 14, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.