NorthernAplomadoFalcon_BaselineData_KeddyHector_Dean_AustinTX_7June2022_Reel4111.mp3

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:00:00] This is interesting and tricky.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:00:02] We don't have a good baseline because the guy who collected most of the aplomado falcon specimens north of Mexico may have collected them in Mexico and passed them off as being from the United States.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:00:16] I'm sure some of them came from the United States, but I don't know how many.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:00:21] His peers accused him of doing that.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:00:24] And one thing I pointed out way back is that the egg sets he collected are essentially all four clutches. And four clutches are relatively rare in the wild. The typical clutch size is three. And if you look at the eggs collected by other collectors, you know, they're singles and doubles and, you know, three eggs. And field studies that have been done in the last 20 years that have documented a few four-egg clutches.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:00:55] But it's pretty apparent he would have clients order some aplomado falcon eggs, and he'd just bundle up four eggs, send them off to the person, and take their money.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:01:05] And, and that's, that's perhaps indicative that he was doing a little data fakery.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:01:11] And there might be some ways to figure out what percentage of those came from the United States. But it kind of clouds the issue of how common they were.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:01:20] Now it's pretty apparent that at specific sites like the Palo Alto Prairie between Port Isabel and Brownsville, they nested regularly there. That's an area where, who Is it, J.C. Merril, reported. He was a physician there at Brownsville, who was also a collector.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:01:39] And some of the sites in New Mexico, it's pretty clear that they're no longer present at those sites. But there was a sprinkling of sightings that persisted after, I guess the last Texas nest site in the 1940s, down near Edinburg.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:02:00] And then in New Mexico, after the last historic sighting in 1952, there's been a wild nesting pair there since 1952 in New Mexico.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:02:11] But it's, so my feeling now is that, well, they declined, but I don't really know how common they were before that.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:02:19] You know, they're a peripheral species right on the northern limit of the distribution. You'd expect it to be somewhat ephemeral because of that: they may be here in some years and not in other years.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:02:32] And so it it makes it, it makes it tricky saying they were "common".

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:02:39] It's not tricky to say they were here.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:02:41] It's just a little tricky if you say they were common because you have to qualify that so well.

Dean Keddy-Hector [00:02:46] One thing that needs to happen, I guess, is to determine where all those eggs and those study skins actually came from, if that's possible at this stage. I mean, I could see maybe using some techniques like stable isotope analysis that might be useful in narrowing it down a little bit.