Chuck Tague

    The Swallow-tailed Kite drifted over the tree line, exactly as I told the man it would.  I was eating my lunch in the visitor center’s parking lot at Lake Woodruff National Wildlife Refuge in DeLeon Springs, Florida, but the kite-seeker was long gone.  He was on his way back to Orlando to take his family to one of the “attractions”.  He introduced himself to me as a birder from the UK and asked if I’d seen any Swallow-tailed kites.  I had not.  Lake Woodruff NWR is a huge place, (21,599 acres) and somewhere in the refuge is the second largest staging area for migrating Swallow-tailed Kites in the United States.  The exact location of the roost is a secret and off-limits to the public.  By mid morning, when the thermals rise and the dragonflies cruise the treetops, the kites fan out.  The British birder had called the refuge office and they assured him that the kites were there in good numbers.  Nobody, however, directed him to a good observation spot.

    It was late morning when he caught up to me along the dike trail.  It was only my second human encounter of the day and it was over an hour since the two hikers went by.  The temperature was already over 90°F and the humidity in the marsh was steamy.  I was trying to photograph dragonflies but the insects weren’t cooperating.  Butterfly and dragonfly enthusiasts consider themselves mad dogs.  Our obsession forces us afield when large colorful insects are most active.  According the Noel Coward song only “Mad Dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun”.

    The British birder was in obvious discomfort.  He’d walked over a mile through blistering-hot marsh land and still had a half-mile to go.  “Bloody hot,” he said, “we don’t have weather like this in the UK.”  Sadly, he was in the wrong habitat.  Swallow-tailed Kites forage over forests and wooded edges.  They cruise the canopy and snag dragonflies and cicadas on the wing.  They dip down and pluck katydids, tree frogs, lizards and snakes from the high branches.  I’ve never seen a Swallow-tailed Kite over an open marsh.  I instructed the birder to keep an eye on the tree lines on his way out.  An old cypress swamp dotted with oak and pine hammocks surrounded the marsh.  I asked him if he had any other target species, hoping I could save his day with a Black-necked Stilt or a King Rail.  He said no, he’d been to Florida many times but never when the Swallow-tails were around.

     Swallow-tailed Kites are more than a check on a life list.  Their colors, pattern, shape and flight style are spectacular.  Every one of my field guides and bird references describe them as striking, graceful and elegant.  Most descriptions include a string of superlative adjectives.  In flight they are a combination of falcon and butterfly.  In my opinion watching swallow-tails slowly drift over Live Oaks draped with Spanish Moss, then pivot their tail streamers ninety degrees to shoot straight up, twist, swoop then disappear is breathtaking.  In addition, at least statistically, they are a rare species with only about one thousand breeding pairs in the United States.  All breed along the southeastern coastal plain from the Carolinas to Texas.  Their population is now stable, but historically their range extended to Ohio and Minnesota.

    When I stopped to examine a dragonfly perched on a shrub the British birder kept going.  There was a lone oak tree, and shade, ahead.  I wished him luck and reminded him to keep an eye on the tree tops.  There was still a chance he and a kite would cross paths. “It’s a spectacular bird.  It will be worth it.”       

    I saw my first Swallow-tailed Kites on July 30, 1995.  Three or four swooped over the tree-line across a blistering hot marsh in South Carolina’s Santee Delta.  The humidity was as thick as the mosquito clouds.  I paid dearly for the addition to my life list, in blood, sweat and petroleum.  It took me three trips to South Carolina, 700 miles one way, but it was worth it.  After my first sighting I couldn’t get enough of the graceful, elegant raptors that cruise southern canopies.  I’ve observed them several time sisnce in the Santee River Delta.  Like Lake Woodruff, this is a vast expanse of marsh intermingled with tall-tree forests.  I travelled to the Everglades National Park to welcome the first migrants returning from the American tropics.  I explored blackwater oxbows that feed into the St. John’s River in central Florida.  I associated Swallow-tailed Kites with wilderness; with sweat, mosquitoes and physical discomfort.  A swallow-tailed sighting, however, was always worth it.

    Three years ago, in mid April, I was in the screened-in porch of our mobile home just north of Daytona Beach.  The temperature was pleasant and a Northern Parula sang in the Live Oak across the street.  A Swallow-tailed swooped down, circled the oak’s spreading dome then drifted into the trees on the trailer park’s perimeter.  When I screamed to Joan the neighbors ran out.  They thought I fell off a ladder.  The kites returned every night for a week.  We watched them pluck Spanish Moss from the old oak.  We discovered their nest on a tall Slash Pine one street to the north.  If we positioned the spotting scope just right we could watch it from our yard.

    This year we spent July in Florida for the first time. There are at least three kite pairs in the neighborhood.  All through the month they cruised over the trailers. Some days we could see eight at the same time.  Once a parent and two fledglings hovered and chattered over our place as they inspected the oaks for cicadas.

    I didn’t tell the British birder that the day before I’d spent fifteen minutes watching kites work the tall pines around the local Walmart.

    Swallow-tailed Kites are not wilderness birds after all.  Like many raptors they adapt well to towns and suburbs if the right combination of nest sites and prey are available.  As a predictable, dependable yard bird are swallow-tails any less valuable?  Are trailer park kites any less exciting?  Not a bit.

(This article also appears in the September issue of the Peregrine, the journal of the Three rivers Birding Club. )