Falcons | Falconiformes

Valkachtigen | Halcones

Birds of prey with a hooked bill, a cere around the nostrils and grasping feet armed with sharp curved claws — the same tools as hawks and eagles carry, yet in the classification this order stands apart from them, beside the parrots and the songbirds; that placement rests on molecular data rather than on appearance. They are daytime meat-eaters that locate prey by eye, with large eyes set in a proportionately large head. The female is bigger than the male, and the difference is greatest in the species that take fast-moving prey in the air. They build no nest of their own. In southern Africa the order is made up of residents, of species that wander the interior once the rains have fallen, and of species that spend the southern summer here after breeding in Eurasia; the last group feeds largely on insects over grassland and gathers in large communal roosts.

Families in this order

Falcons | Falconidae16 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.