The term aplomado is Spanish and means “lead colored” referring to the dark blue-gray of the back of this handsome falcon. Below it is strongly patterned with a full dark vest contrasting with a paler breast and belly. The belly and vent is cinnamon in all forms, but the breast is whitish in North America – Central America, and cinnamon farther south in South America. All forms show a highly contrasting face with a bold pale supercilium, often whitish in front and cinnamon at back, a dark face stripe and moustache and pale cheeks. The Aplomado is a slim falcon with a long and strongly banded tail. It is a falcon of savanna, and grassland adjacent to shrubbery, in the north of the range including grassland adjacent to desert scrub. This is an incredibly broadly distributed raptor in the New World, found from the Southwest of the United States south to Tierra del Fuego, although it is absent from moist tropical forest, it is not found in the Amazon Basin for example. In the far north of its range it had suffered historical population declines and there is an active and successful program to bring it back to the United States southwest.

2. American Kestrel Falco sparverius
he American Kestrel is a widespread, familiar small falcon of open country throughout the Americas. It is resident through much of the Neotropics, although it is absent from much of the Amazon basin, and in much of Mexico and Central America it is present only as nonbreeder during the northern winter. Kestrels occur in a wide array of open habitats including desert, grassland, savanna, scrub, agricultural land, and grassy marshes at all elevations. The male is orange on the back and tail, with blue gray wings, a blue gray cap, and black markings on the face and belly. The female is similar but lacks the blue gray color and is uniform orange above. The roughly seventeen subspecies differ slightly in plumage saturation and in size. Subspecies sparverioides of Cuba, the Isle of Pines, and the Bahamas is the most distinctive; it has a dark morph that is very sooty overall and a light morph that is much paler than most other populations. The American Kestrel feeds on arthropods and various small vertebrates, hunting either from a perch or by hovering in the air. It nests in an adopted cavity or ledge in a cliff, bank, trunk, or building or adopts an old stick nest.

 The range of the Purplish-mantled Tanager extends continuously through the subtropical zones of the Western and Central Andes of western Colombia into western Ecuador (Hellmayr 1936, Cuervo et al. 2008a). It is most often encountered at elevations between 1500-2200 m, though can be found as low as 750 m or as high as 2700 m (Isler and Isler 1987, Fjeldså and Krabbe 1990). It is considered fairly common in the Chocó foothills (Cuervo et al. 2008a, 2008b), and common in the Tambito/Munchique region (Donegan and Dávalos 1999). Avian surveys suggest that the Purplish-mantled Tanager occur rarely in Ecuador and are more numerous in Colombia (Ridgely and Greenfield 2001). Nine breeding condition birds were reported, having a breeding range located on the northern end of the Western and Central Andes (Hilty and Brown 1986). The center of elevational abundance is in the middle montane zone (Parker et al. 1996). This species occurs in the following Zoogeographic Region: Northern Andes (Parker et al. 1996).