Animal Of The Month
This story appears as an on-going series in the "Gilroy Dispatch", "Morgan Hill Times" and "Hollister Freelance".
October, 2015: White Tailed Kite
By Colleen Grzan
werc@werc-ca.org
October, 2015: White Tailed Kite
By Colleen Grzan
werc@werc-ca.org
White Tailed Kite
Thanks to the thousands of people who stopped by the Wildlife Education and Rehabilitation Center’s display with our educational animals at the Taste of Morgan Hill last month. WERC has been making it presence visible to the community at the event since the very first in 1989. WERC’s dedicated staff and volunteers at the booth not only provide answers to questions about wildlife but sometimes serve as an emergency resource.
Last year, a volunteer was called out to rescue a sick young fox. People have brought injured songbirds to our booth and we once even had a sweet little girl bring us a butterfly that had hurt its wing. This year’s rescue was a hawk brought to WERC’s booth Saturday afternoon. It had been found struggling in a swimming pool and appeared to be near-death with its eyes closed and breathing shallowly. Volunteers quickly drove the bird to WERC’s facility in Morgan Hill, where the juvenile white-tailed kite was immediately warmed up and given fluids. Within a couple of hours, the kite had improved dramatically, now standing and alert. Because the bird was severely emaciated, staff gave the kite liquid nourishment throughout the night. The next day, though with a guarded prognosis, the raptor seemed to be on the way to recovery. Alas, with heavy hearts we found that the kite had passed away early Sunday evening. Despite its intensive treatment, the kite’s starvation had ultimately caused its internal organs to fail. The drought has reduced the population of raptors’ prey and this inexperienced young hunter wasn’t able to find enough to survive.
That there are any avian kites in our local skies at all is fortunate. White-tailed kites nearly became extinct in the 1930s and 1940s due to shooting and egg-collecting, but are now again common in California. White-tailed kites are found from the West and Gulf Coasts of the United States south to Mexico, Central America, and eastern South America. In California, they can be found in the Central Valley, southern coastal areas, and the San Francisco Bay area. I observed some recently at Harvey Bear Ranch County Park and at the Coyote Creek ponds in northern Morgan Hill. Other favorite viewing spots are Elkhorn Slough, Uvas Creek Preserve, Rancho San Antonio Open Space, Palo Alto Baylands, and Shoreline Park. At dawn and dusk, watch for them at preserves, open woodlands, marshes, grassland, and cultivated fields where you may see kestrel falcons also hovering over fields looking for small rodents. They hold a stationary position in midair without flapping by facing into the wind, a characteristic called kiting.
The 14”-long kites are easily identified by their distinctive coloring. Adults are mostly white with gray back and wings and have red eyes; juveniles have cinnamon-colored streaks on their breast and have yellow eyes. Adults and juveniles both sport the distinctive black “eye liner” coloring around their eyes. Often seen perched on tops of trees or powerlines, the raptors are normally a solitary species but collectively a group of kites is fittingly called a "string" of kites— evidently, not all kites in the sky have strings attached.
Last year, a volunteer was called out to rescue a sick young fox. People have brought injured songbirds to our booth and we once even had a sweet little girl bring us a butterfly that had hurt its wing. This year’s rescue was a hawk brought to WERC’s booth Saturday afternoon. It had been found struggling in a swimming pool and appeared to be near-death with its eyes closed and breathing shallowly. Volunteers quickly drove the bird to WERC’s facility in Morgan Hill, where the juvenile white-tailed kite was immediately warmed up and given fluids. Within a couple of hours, the kite had improved dramatically, now standing and alert. Because the bird was severely emaciated, staff gave the kite liquid nourishment throughout the night. The next day, though with a guarded prognosis, the raptor seemed to be on the way to recovery. Alas, with heavy hearts we found that the kite had passed away early Sunday evening. Despite its intensive treatment, the kite’s starvation had ultimately caused its internal organs to fail. The drought has reduced the population of raptors’ prey and this inexperienced young hunter wasn’t able to find enough to survive.
That there are any avian kites in our local skies at all is fortunate. White-tailed kites nearly became extinct in the 1930s and 1940s due to shooting and egg-collecting, but are now again common in California. White-tailed kites are found from the West and Gulf Coasts of the United States south to Mexico, Central America, and eastern South America. In California, they can be found in the Central Valley, southern coastal areas, and the San Francisco Bay area. I observed some recently at Harvey Bear Ranch County Park and at the Coyote Creek ponds in northern Morgan Hill. Other favorite viewing spots are Elkhorn Slough, Uvas Creek Preserve, Rancho San Antonio Open Space, Palo Alto Baylands, and Shoreline Park. At dawn and dusk, watch for them at preserves, open woodlands, marshes, grassland, and cultivated fields where you may see kestrel falcons also hovering over fields looking for small rodents. They hold a stationary position in midair without flapping by facing into the wind, a characteristic called kiting.
The 14”-long kites are easily identified by their distinctive coloring. Adults are mostly white with gray back and wings and have red eyes; juveniles have cinnamon-colored streaks on their breast and have yellow eyes. Adults and juveniles both sport the distinctive black “eye liner” coloring around their eyes. Often seen perched on tops of trees or powerlines, the raptors are normally a solitary species but collectively a group of kites is fittingly called a "string" of kites— evidently, not all kites in the sky have strings attached.