White Tailed Kites - A Family Affair

Perhaps you have seen birds fluttering in one place in the air. I have seen Northern Harriers do this as well as kestrels. But most commonly it is the white-tailed Kite. Three years ago there was a family of them in the Laguna De Santa Rosa and I had the privilege of witnessing their behaviors and capturing some of it with my camera. This first picture (above) shows a juvenile in flight and an adult on the branch. The juveniles are distinguishable by the brown markings. This Kite family had three juveniles and one adult, perhaps two adults but I only saw one at any given time.

Late one evening I saw this scene with the adult holding a gopher or vole while the three juveniles gathered.

I was particularly taken by the orientation of the juvenile's body on the bottom left. As it turned out I got several shots of juveniles in unusual positions. On one occasion I photographed one of the juveniles doing a somersault in mid air (topic of an earlier post).

Now this picture above and the one below are particularly noteworthy. Above you can see the adult with the prey in its talons with all the juveniles approaching. In the below picture the prey is missing. The second image was taken approximately one second after the first (according to my camera's readout)

I believe this is a demonstration of the importance of the family unit for wild life as I think the adult is teaching the juveniles how to hunt. She drops the prey in anticipation the youngsters will go after it. I saw this pattern with foxes, where the vixen would at first bring prey to the kits already killed. They would also stash the prey for the kits to find. But as they matured the vixen would bring them live prey in preparation for teaching them to hunt for themselves. I suspect this kite is doing a similar service for her young. Within a week of these pictures being taken, you could see the juveniles in the hunting mode, stationary in the air looking down.

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Notes To My Mother

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