It’s not even May, and the “Swallow-tailed Kite triangle” of Cape Cod is already popping off with early sightings. There were no fewer than five reports of this improbably graceful hawk over the last week, all in the usual area spanning from South Sandwich to Mashpee and over to Marstons Mills. But these birds don’t belong anywhere near here, so how is there a “usual area” in the first place?
The Swallow-tailed Kite triangle is an ornithological oddity, to put it mildly. Suddenly, over the last five years or so, this primarily South American hawk, a species that breeds no further north than the Carolinas, has taken up a mysterious annual residency in a small, well-defined section of the Upper Cape. It’s gotten to the point where, in June, you are more likely to see a Swallow-tailed Kite in Mashpee, Sandwich, and Barnstable than over most of North Carolina, a state where they normally breed.
Here in the US, these kites mostly breed in Florida, then in late July and August they start to get chilly and high-tail it to South America for the winter, joining the expansive resident population there. If you listen regularly, for some reason, you may know that we get a lot of southern overshoots in spring – birds who meant to stop in Florida or the Carolinas but got caught over the water and blown north, eventually back to land here on the Cape. But these are typically transients, disappearing after a week or two at most. These kites, on the other hand, seem to have settled in. Bizarrely, a pair of Swallow-tailed Kites was even seen, let’s say consummating their marriage in South Sandwich back in late summer of 2022, much too late for breeding but highly suspicious nonetheless.
So over the next month, I want all you people in the Swallow-tailed Kite triangle to be on high alert for nesting behavior – watch for multiple birds interacting or carrying nesting material, I guess that part is fairly obvious, or just repeated sightings in the same spot. Apparently, in the early 1800s, they had a bigger range, including up the Mississippi valley as far north as Minnesota, but they both declined precipitously and retracted their breeding range since then. Maybe these Upper Cape kites are early pioneers in an effort to reclaim some form of the old 19th-century northern nesting grounds.
You could of course see a Swallow-tailed Kite other places – the old best place to see them in spring was Pilgrim Heights in Truro on strong southwest winds, and that’s still a great place to look for them, and for Mississippi Kites. On promising wind days, some enterprising birders have done kite stake-outs on the top of Bearberry Hill up in the Truro’s Pamet Valley, scoring excellent, eye-level photos of Swallow-tailed Kites on several occasions in recent years.
But alas, most of us will not see kites. Which is ok, because this week begins the most intense month of migration in the ornithological calendar. Just over the last week catbirds, orioles, Great-crested Flycatchers, and towhees are suddenly back in my neighborhood, with legions of migrating warblers, tanagers, buntings, and other songbirds on their way. Unlike the protracted and leisurely fall migration, spring migration is short and serious - by early June, it’ll all be over. So, as that old poem says, May is a time to “gather ye Rose-breasted Grosbeaks while ye may.” At least that’s how I remember it – I probably should have Googled it.
