Falcons | Falconiformes

Valkachtigen | Halcones

Raptors with a hooked bill, a cere around the nostrils and grasping feet with sharp, curved claws, the same equipment as hawks and eagles. Yet in the classification this order stands apart from them, next to the parrots and the passerines; that placement rests on molecular data, not on appearance. They are meat-eaters hunting by day or at dusk, with large eyes in a relatively large head. In Mexico and Central America the order consists of a single family, present here in all its forms. The caracaras, such as Crested Caracara, spend much time walking on the ground, eat carrion and small animals and build a stick nest of their own. Laughing Falcon specialises in snakes and gives loud, laughing duets at dusk. The forest falcons (Micrastur) hunt from ambush in dense forest with short wings and a long tail. The true falcons, such as Bat Falcon, which takes bats and birds at dusk, build no nest; in them the female is clearly larger than the male. Besides resident birds, migrants from the north winter here, such as Merlin and Peregrine Falcon, and American Kestrel occurs both as a resident and as a winter visitor.

Families in this order

Falcons and caracaras | Falconidae14 speciesThe cutting edge of the upper mandible carries a sharp tooth that fits a notch in the lower: falcons kill with a bite through the neck, not with the crushing power of the foot as hawks do. The wing is long and pointed and the beat stiff and rowing; inside the nostril sits a small bony knob that breaks the airflow in fast dives. The smallest member of the family is the size of a sparrow and hunts lizards and insects from a low perch; the largest take doves and francolins in the air. They make no nest but lay on a cliff ledge, in a tree hole, on a building or in a disused nest of a crow, a raptor or a hamerkop; the pygmy falcon lays inside one of the chambers of the sociable weaver's communal haystack. The eggs are buff and densely covered with red-brown markings, which separates them from the white or bluish eggs of the other diurnal raptors; the clutch is usually two to five, incubated mostly by the female while the male brings the food. A few species are present in numbers outside the breeding season and then roost communally in trees in villages and towns, with hundreds to many thousands of birds at a single site.