It is tempting to think of swallow-tailed kites as ethereal creatures, winged beasts that dip in and out of our plane of existence at will and for the most mysterious of reasons, to think of them as creatures that, as the dictionary says, are too perfect for this world.
But it’s best, I’ve learned, not to get overly metaphysical when talking to other birders. Unless you enjoy the experience of having people quietly sidle away from you. Sometimes I’ll see a bird like a swallow-tailed kite and be able to keep it all battened down and just say something like, “Hey, look at that.”
Sometimes I’ll get so riled by it that I’ll be on the edge of running down the street like George Bailey at the end of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” grabbing people by their shirt fronts, pointing at the bird, ranting about the miracle of it all. I try to mask those urges by saying a few things that will only sound half crazy, but it doesn’t always work.
All bird flight is miraculous in my mind, despite my understanding of basic aeronautical principles of lift, weight and drag. I also understand the stuff about how feathers, hollow bones and pectorals make it all happen. I understand how flight works. I just don’t fully believe it all the time. And a bird like a swallow-tailed kite will, on occasion, make me question if rational thought is really the best way to approach these things.
Part of it is how good swallow-tails are at what they do. There was a character in the middle book of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy who possessed an object known as the Subtle Knife, a blade that let him see and open up the seams that allowed passage between different worlds in a quantum universe.
Swallow-tailed kites seem to possess the avian equivalent of the subtle knife, owning the air in ways that other birds don’t, can’t. They have a habit of materializing out of nowhere. They fly with an assurance that never seems hurried, even when they are flying faster than any other bird around. They feed by snagging things – small lizards, small snakes, grasshoppers, dragonflies – from the treetops and bushtops, sweeping in with an efficiency that seems predestined, devouring on the fly. Several accounts describe them as flying like oversized swallows, but swallows fly as if they’re on some barely-under-control sled ride after a couple hits of schnapps. Swallow-tailed kites are like pro figure skaters at the top of their game.
They will often disappear from the sky as quickly, and without notice, as they appeared.
All of this may sound superficial, but it’s backed up in the data. Raptors mostly migrate by rising high on thermals, then gliding as far as they can until they find the next thermal. Most raptors can only find thermals over land, which means they try to avoid crossing water, and when they do cross – say across Delaware Bay, or from the Keys to Cuba – they do it at the narrowest possible point, because it requires powered flight (flapping) which is exhausting and risky.
Satellite tracking has shown that swallow-tails, unlike any other known migrating raptor, can find rising air thermals over the water. More to the point, they can find thermals out over the water at night. They find a way to move through worlds that no one else can.
Their package is also part of their wonder. I mean, ranking birds by their beauty is as dumb as ranking art or music or writing. At a certain point those rankings are just meaningless, something that’s fun to argue about but contrary to the point.
But if there was some kind of ranking, swallow-tails are at the top of their class. There is just such a sleekness and simplicity to their design. Their long, sleek, pointed black wings, the rounded white rood shape that spreads across their breast, belly and wing interior, all of it so clean, so sharp, so precise.
The long, deeply forked black tail seems a little excessive at first, like any guitarist playing a Flying V onstage, except ultimately it works, because everyone can use a little visual bombast. Also, when you see a swallow-tail flying upwind, its head and wings will always be rock steady, and the tail will be rapidly adjusting to the air currents, keeping all that smoothness in line.
Swallow-tailed kites have begun to migrate out of Florida and toward South America in recent weeks. A good number will move through the Florida Keys. Because of their aerial mastery, the movements of swallow-tailed kites during migration are largely not understood and therefore also hard to predict. But two research groups that are far more rational than I are trying to learn as much as they can about how the kites move, what routes they take, and maybe even how and why they take those routes.
The first is the Florida Keys Hawkwatch, based at Curry Hammock State Park in Marathon, which started on Aug. 1, instead of Sept. 1, for the third year, as swallow-tails tend to migrate a month before all the other raptors. Last year lead counter Mariah Hryniewich had to wait nearly two weeks to get into the double digits on the number of kites she saw, but then she started to see clusters of them – 93 birds in one day, then 228, 265, 609, and ultimately 1,438 on Aug. 17 — 909 of those birds in a span of 11 minutes.
This year she was expecting perhaps another slow beginning, but the first day she saw 114 swallow-tails, the next 239, and on the fifth day 930 kites. So it could be a banner year for swallow-tailed kites in the Keys. (Follow the Florida Keys Hawkwatch on Facebook, or at floridakeyshawkwatch.com.)
The Avian Research and Conservation Institute are the OG swallow-tailed kite researchers in Florida. They’ve been tracking individual birds for several years, and this year have GPS/cellular trackers on 12 swallow-tails. (The units track their movements using GPS, then report them back when the birds fly near cell towers.)
So far only one of their birds has made it to Central America. A bird named Lucky Lox flew down the peninsula, through the Keys, over the Curry Hammock count site, spent four days in Cuba, and is now in the Yucatan. I was thinking it might have been one of the birds Mariah Hryniewich counted, but according to Gina Kent, senior conservation scientist at ARCI, it crossed over Cuba on June 22, before the count had started.Kent thinks two other birds may have also crossed over, but their data upload is still pending. Which leaves nine birds still working their way through Florida, and nine other chances for these two projects to cross paths. (You can follow ARCI, and their birds, on Facebook, and at arcinst.org.)
