The national animal of Argentina is the rufous hornero (Furnarius rufus), a small reddish-brown ovenbird that has been the country’s ave nacional, or national bird, since 1928. It is not on the flag or the coat of arms, but it has been struck on a coin (the half-centavo austral of 1985), printed on a banknote (the 1,000-peso note issued in 2017), used as the emblem of Argentina’s oldest bird society and the title of its scientific journal, and put on Argentine stamps. The living bird is common across northern and central Argentina, builds clay nests shaped like a wood-fired oven, and is rated Least Concern by the IUCN.
Missing From the Flag and the 1813 Escudo
Argentina’s two senior emblems contain no animal at all, which is why the hornero’s story is told through coins, notes and crests instead. The flag, first raised by Manuel Belgrano on 27 February 1812, carries only light-blue and white stripes and the golden Sun of May. The coat of arms, the Escudo de la República Argentina, grew out of the seal of the General Constituent Assembly of 1813 and was fixed in its current form in 1944: a rising sun above an oval in which two clasped hands hold a pike topped by a Phrygian cap, all framed by laurel. Hands, cap, sun and leaves stand for unity and liberty; no beast or bird was ever added.
The hornero therefore sits in a second tier of national symbols, alongside plants chosen in the twentieth century. The ceibo (Erythrina crista-galli), a coral tree with red flowers, has been the national flower since 1942, and the quebracho colorado was declared the Árbol Forestal Nacional, the national forest tree, in 1956. The bird came first of the three, in 1928, and it was the first emblem added to the list in 110 years: the cockade, coat of arms, anthem, flag and Sun of May had stood alone since 1812–1818.
The Half-Centavo Austral Coin of 1985
The hornero’s first appearance on Argentine currency came with the austral, the money introduced on 15 June 1985 under the Plan Austral of Economy Minister Juan Vital Sourrouille. The austral replaced the peso argentino at a rate of one austral to 1,000 pesos, and the new coins carried a capital A with an extra bar, the symbol ₳, to tell them apart from older money. The first set of coins came in 1985 in denominations of ½, 1, 5, 10 and 50 centavos, and the smallest of them, the half centavo, carried the hornero.
That coin had a very short life. The ½-centavo was struck only in 1985. By 1989 Argentina was in hyperinflation; prices rose about 200 per cent in July of that year alone. The mint had moved on to coins of 1, 5 and 10 australes, then 100, 500 and 1,000 australes in 1990 and 1991. The austral itself ended on 31 December 1991, when the convertible peso replaced it. A coin worth half of one hundredth of an austral had become almost worthless within four years, which makes the hornero half-centavo a small piece of Argentina’s economic history as well as of its symbolism.
The 1,000-Peso Note of 2017
The bird returned to money three decades later and in a far more visible form. On 15 January 2016 the Banco Central de la República Argentina announced a new family of banknotes built around native wildlife rather than historical figures: each note shows an animal on the front and its natural habitat on the back. The 200- and 500-peso notes appeared in 2016, the 20- and 1,000-peso notes in 2017, and the 50- and 100-peso notes in 2018. The hornero was given the highest value of the set, the 1,000-peso note.
The series did well with collectors and judges. The 500-peso note in the same family received the LatiNum award for the best Latin American banknote of 2015/2016, and the 200-peso note won the same award for 2016/2017. Politics then turned against it. In 2022 the central bank announced replacement designs that put historical figures back on the 100, 200, 500 and 1,000-peso notes, including José de San Martín on the 1,000. The hornero thousand was never withdrawn: Argentine banknote series stay legal tender alongside their successors, and the wildlife notes were still in use in 2026, though inflation has steadily eroded what a 1,000-peso note buys. Our guide to the currency of Argentina follows how the peso reached the point where four-figure notes became small change.
El Hornero: A Journal Since 1917 and the Aves Argentinas Crest
Long before it reached a coin, the hornero had become the crest of Argentine ornithology. The Sociedad Ornitológica del Plata was founded in Buenos Aires on 28 July 1916, and it is known today as Aves Argentinas/Asociación Ornitológica del Plata. The society adopted the hornero as its winged emblem, and in October 1917 it began publishing a scientific journal named after the bird: El Hornero, still issued twice a year as a journal of Neotropical ornithology.
El Hornero is the oldest academic ornithology journal in Spanish-speaking America. It is indexed in Scopus and is freely available through the SciELO library. The same year it was launched, according to the ornithologists Tito Narosky and Raúl Carman, the first drawing of a hornero and its nest appeared in an Argentine field guide, written and illustrated by the entomologist Juan Brèthes (1871–1928), one of the society’s founding members. Narosky and Carman later devoted a whole book to the bird, El Hornero, Ave Nacional, published in Buenos Aires in 2008.
Stamps, a Lugones Poem and a Monument in Roque Pérez
The hornero has appeared on postage stamps issued by Argentina, and also by neighbouring Brazil and Uruguay, where the same species is a familiar farmyard bird. On stamps, as on the 1,000-peso note, it is usually shown with its nest, because the nest is what makes the bird recognisable at a glance.
Literature and music have used it too. Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), whose verse is often counted among the founding works of modern Spanish-language poetry, wrote a poem about the hornero, and the bird’s song was among those that inspired the French composer Olivier Messiaen, who built much of his work on transcribed birdsong. Folk songs and legends about the hornero circulate across much of South America.
The hornero even has a monument of its own, the Monumento al Hornero in the partido of Roque Pérez in Buenos Aires Province, whose main town lies about 135 km from the city of Buenos Aires. The partido covers about 1,600 km² of Pampas farmland with roughly 11,000 inhabitants: the open, fenced, mud-rich country in which horneros are a daily sight on posts and poles.
Furnarius rufus Beyond the Banknote
The bird behind all these emblems is a medium-sized ovenbird of the family Furnariidae, 18 to 20 cm long and weighing about 31 to 58 g, with males the heavier. It has a rufous-brown back, pale buffy underparts, a whitish throat and a slender, slightly curved bill about 2.5 cm long. Males and females look alike. Its name says what it does: hornero comes from the Spanish horno, “oven”, and the genus name Furnarius from the Latin furnus, with the same meaning.
The species has a long scientific history in Argentina. The French naturalist Philibert Commerson took the first notes on it in 1767 from a bird collected at the Ensenada de Barragán, on the Río de la Plata shore of what is now Buenos Aires Province, during Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s voyage. Johann Friedrich Gmelin gave it its first formal scientific name, Merops rufus, in 1788, and the current name Furnarius rufus was first used by John Gould in 1841 in his account of the birds of the Beagle voyage.
Pairs are monogamous and usually stay together for years, sometimes for life, and they hold a territory of about a quarter of a hectare to one hectare all year round. Their duet is the sound of the Argentine countryside: the male delivers a fast trill, the female a slower one, and each beats its wings in time with its own song, so an observer can tell the sexes apart by wingbeat speed alone. They feed on the ground, walking rather than hopping, and take beetles, crickets, ants, spiders and worms, along with the occasional bread crumb.
The 5 kg Clay Oven on the Fence Post
The nest is a dome of mud mixed with plant fibre, horsehair, dung and small stones. Inside, a curved wall separates the entrance from the brood chamber, which is lined with grass and feathers, and each pair tends to build its entrance on the same side, left or right, season after season. A finished nest weighs on average about 5 kg. Building can take as little as four or five days when mud is plentiful, but often takes weeks. The clutch is usually three or four white eggs, both parents incubate, and the chicks stay in the nest for about 23 to 26 days.
Least Concern: A Bird That Gained From Fences and Poles
Unlike many national animals, the hornero is not endangered. The IUCN lists it as Least Concern, and its range covers central and southern Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and northern and central Argentina, reaching as far south as northern Patagonia. Four subspecies are recognised, and three of them occur in Argentina: F. r. commersoni in the north-west, F. r. paraguayae in the north and the nominate F. r. rufus from Uruguay to central Argentina.
The bird has done well because of people, not in spite of them. It is synanthropic: it prefers savanna, scrub, pasture and farmland, and it thrives in city parks and suburbs. Fence posts, telephone poles and buildings give it nest sites, irrigation provides mud, and ploughing turns up insects. Farmers tolerate it because it eats crop pests, although nests on power poles occasionally cause short circuits. Its main natural predators are birds of prey such as the black-chested buzzard-eagle, along with snakes and domestic cats; the closed nest keeps most eggs safe. Average life expectancy in the wild is about three to four years, with individuals recorded living to eight.
Abandoned nests are a resource for other species. The saffron finch is one of many birds that move into old hornero “ovens”, which is why several nests of different ages can often be seen stacked on the same post. That habit of living alongside people on the open plains of the Pampas is a large part of why the bird became a familiar emblem. You can see the landscape it belongs to in our overview of Argentina’s geography, or compare it with the sun and stripes it never joined in the history of the flag of Argentina.