Endangered Falcon Program Called Environmental Cooperation Model : Texas: Peregrine Fund is reintroducing the aplomado, virtually unseen in the United States since the 1950s, back into the wild.

A wooden cage stands on stilts deep in a savannah amid yucca plants and bright blue-green lagoons.

Perched stoically inside, aplomado falcon chicks exercise their wings to prepare for their first flight.

Aplomados once soared across northern Mexico, southern Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. But today the protective cages may be the only hope of survival for the endangered birds of prey.

The Peregrine Fund Inc. began a program this summer to reintroduce the aplomado, virtually unseen in the United States since the 1950s, back into the wild.

The bird nearly became a symbol of conflict between farmers and environmentalists in South Texas, much as the northern spotted owl represents division between loggers and conservationists in the Pacific Northwest.

Instead, the effort to save the aplomado from extinction shows that cooperation can work, according to Steve Thompson, manager of the Laguna Atascosa Refuge.

The Peregrine Fund bred the aplomado chicks in captivity in Boise, Idaho, from a population found in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The fund has released 26 aplomados from three cages at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Atascosa refuge this year; up to 50 releases are planned each year for the next decade.

“There are predators out here,” said Betty Moore, who is spending a hot summer monitoring the fledglings from dawn to dusk for the Peregrine Fund. “These birds don’t have parents, so we are looking after them.”

After a few weeks to allow the chicks to get used to their new surroundings, crews opened the cages for the birds’ first flight. The monitors feed the fledglings frozen quail each morning so the birds use the cage sites as safe houses while learning to hunt for themselves.

“I think these birds instinctively fly and hunt,” said Moore, a raft guide in Big Bend National Park during the rest of the year. “Maybe they do learn more quickly with parents, but basically they do fine without them.”

Some fledglings are flying up to 15 miles away before returning to their cages or showing up at the cages of fellow aplomados, Thompson said.

Three newly released aplomados have fallen prey, probably to other raptors or coyotes.

Experts expect the aplomados to establish themselves and breed along the South Texas Gulf Coast and into Mexico, feeding on grackles, blackbirds, large insects and small mammals. But researchers are unsure how the dark-winged, white-breasted falcons will behave.

“This bird disappeared before we knew much about it,” Thompson said.

Biologists suspect several reasons behind the aplomado’s near-extinction: shrinking habitats, hunting, egg collecting and pesticides such as DDT that wound up in the food chain.

Peregrine vice president J. Peter Jenny said the program will restore “one of nature’s finest works of art.” And periodic blood tests on the aplomados might prove even more valuable to humans.

Falcons are highly sensitive to environmental contaminants and habitat changes, he said; the blood samples could be an early warning for health risks to people.

Jenny noted that Laguna Atascosa is in Cameron County, where experts have been unable to explain alarmingly high rates of rare birth defects in humans, including anencephaly--babies born with undeveloped and exposed brains.

Some environmentalists suspect that pesticides or pollution from border factories in Mexico have caused the high incidence of fatal neural tube defects in Cameron County.

Beginning in 1985, the Peregrine Fund released 24 aplomados at the King Ranch and Laguna Atascosa as a pilot program for the current project.

Two years later, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed banning dozens of pesticides in Cameron County to protect the endangered falcons.

Local cotton farmers were stunned.

Terry Lockamy, the county’s agricultural extension agent, said the proposal would have created so severe a pest problem that it would have put the county’s $100-million cotton industry out of business.

“This had all the earmarks of becoming a spotted owl (problem),” he said.

But farmers, environmentalists, chemical company representatives and the Fish and Wildlife Service formed the Cameron County Agriculture-Wildlife Coexistence Committee.

The members promised to accept each other’s expertise and eventually found middle ground for voluntary reductions of certain pesticides, Thompson said. For example, the farmers agreed to switch to the liquid form of one pesticide because falcon prey had been eating the granular form.

Meanwhile, the EPA has yet to act on its 1987 proposal.

Thompson said the dispute over old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest posed a much more complicated problem. But he said the Cameron County committee’s approach also would have worked there better than the protracted litigation involving the spotted owl.

Farmer Wayne Halbert, the committee chairman, said growers have become more educated about chemicals because of the aplomado issue. But that is unlikely to stop some complaints as the government tries to ban new chemicals under the Endangered Species Act, he said.

Jenny said the private fund wouldn’t have picked Cameron County if not for the committee’s effort to work together.