Few North American birds can make someone stop and stare at the sky quite like the Swallow-tailed Kite. With incredibly long wings, brilliant black-and-white plumage, and a deeply forked tail that constantly twists and turns in flight, this unmistakable raptor looks almost effortless as it moves through the air.

Unlike the heavy, powerful flight associated with many hawks and eagles, a Swallow-tailed Kite seems to float. It can spend enormous amounts of time soaring without appearing to flap its wings at all. Small adjustments of its wings and extraordinary tail allow the kite to bank, dive, climb, and suddenly change direction.

For birders and wildlife photographers in the southeastern United States, seeing a Swallow-tailed Kite soaring over a wetland or cypress swamp can easily become one of the highlights of the year.

What Is a Swallow-tailed Kite?

The Swallow-tailed Kite (Elanoides forficatus) is a distinctive bird of prey belonging to the same family as hawks and eagles. It occurs across portions of the Americas, with the population breeding in the United States concentrated in the Southeast.

The species gets its name from its extraordinarily long, deeply forked tail, which resembles the tail shape of a swallow.

An adult Swallow-tailed Kite is approximately 19.7–25.2 inches long, yet weighs only about 13.1–21.2 ounces. Its wingspan reaches approximately 48 inches. Despite having roughly the overall length of a Red-tailed Hawk, a Swallow-tailed Kite can weigh less than half as much.

That lightweight body combined with narrow, pointed wings helps create the kite’s distinctive buoyant flight.

Swallow-tailed Kite Identification

There are few North American raptors easier to identify.

An adult Swallow-tailed Kite combines a bright white head and underparts with dark wings, back, and tail. From underneath, the contrast is especially striking: the inner portions of the wings appear white while the flight feathers are dark.

But the feature that immediately gives the bird away is the tail.

The black tail is extraordinarily long and divided into a deep V-shaped fork. While soaring, the bird constantly rotates, opens, closes, and twists this tail.

Juvenile Swallow-tailed Kites resemble adults closely but can show a subtle buff-colored wash across portions of the head and breast.

From a great distance, look for: extremely long, narrow wings, a slim body, contrasting black-and-white plumage, very little wing flapping, an exceptionally long, deeply forked tail

Once you’ve watched one maneuver overhead, the silhouette becomes difficult to forget.

Masters of Flight

The Swallow-tailed Kite may be one of the most aerially specialized raptors in North America.

These birds spend much of their day in the air. Rather than continuously flapping their wings, they use rising air currents and subtle adjustments of their enormous tail to remain airborne.

The tail essentially acts as an extremely sophisticated rudder.

Watch one closely and you’ll notice the tail continuously moving even when the wings appear almost motionless. A slight rotation can send the kite into a sweeping turn. Seconds later, the bird can reverse direction or dive toward the treetops.

Their maneuverability becomes especially impressive while hunting. Swallow-tailed Kites can snatch prey from vegetation without landing and even roll or turn sharply to capture flying insects.

Adults routinely eat while flying rather than landing with their prey.

This aerial lifestyle is one of the defining characteristics of the species.

What Do Swallow-tailed Kites Eat?

Despite being raptors, Swallow-tailed Kites don’t survive primarily by hunting mammals.

A large portion of their diet consists of insects.

They frequently capture: Dragonflies, cicadas, beetles, wasps, ants, and other flying insects. But their diet expands substantially during the breeding season.

Swallow-tailed Kites can glide just above a forest canopy and pluck small animals directly from branches and vegetation without stopping. These can include tree frogs, lizards, small snakes, nestling birds, and occasionally other prey. Less commonly, they may consume bats, small fish, and even fruit.

One particularly fascinating behavior involves stinging insects.

Swallow-tailed Kites readily consume wasps and ants. In Florida, birds have even been observed carrying entire wasp nests back to their nests, consuming the larvae and incorporating material from the wasp nest into their own nest.

Swallow-tailed Kite Habitat

In the United States, Swallow-tailed Kites are strongly associated with the landscapes of the Southeast.

Prime habitat includes cypress swamps, river corridors, wetlands, marshes, wet prairies, pine forests, hardwood hammocks, mangrove forests, and other wooded landscapes near open feeding areas.

They need a combination of two major habitat features: Tall trees for nesting and productive open areas for hunting.

That combination allows adults to place their nests high above the surrounding landscape while having easy access to wetlands, forests, rivers, and marshes containing abundant prey.

Where Can You Find Swallow-tailed Kites?

For birders in the United States, Florida is one of the best places to search for Swallow-tailed Kites.

They can also be found across portions of the broader southeastern United States, particularly around large river systems and wooded wetlands.

A good strategy is surprisingly simple: Look up.

These aren’t birds that typically require searching through dense vegetation. Scan above wetlands, rivers, swamps, and forest edges for a long-winged raptor slowly circling overhead. During summer, you may see them barely moving their wings as they ride thermals hundreds of feet above the landscape. Occasional individuals also wander surprisingly far north of the species’ primary U.S. breeding range.

Nesting and Breeding

Swallow-tailed Kite nesting takes place high above the ground.

Pairs generally select an exposed location near the top of one of the tallest available trees in open woodland or forest. Both members of the pair contribute material and participate in nest construction. The nest itself is relatively shallow and loosely constructed from sticks, often with softer materials such as Spanish moss and lichens incorporated into it.

A nest may measure approximately 12–25 inches across and 5–12 inches high.

A typical Swallow-tailed Kite clutch contains: 1–3 eggs

The eggs are generally creamy white with brown or reddish-brown markings. Incubation lasts approximately 27–33 days. After hatching, the young remain in the nest for roughly 35–42 days before reaching the fledging stage.

During the early nestling period, males deliver prey to the nest. The male may arrive carrying prey in its feet, transfer it to its bill, and pass it to the female. She then tears the food into smaller pieces for the young.

Interestingly, Swallow-tailed Kites aren’t always solitary nesters. Multiple pairs may establish nests relatively near one another, creating loose nesting “neighborhoods.”

Swallow-tailed Kite Migration

One of the most remarkable chapters of the Swallow-tailed Kite’s life occurs when summer begins drawing to a close.

The Swallow-tailed Kites breeding in the United States are long-distance migrants.

After raising their young, they leave their southeastern breeding grounds and travel south toward their nonbreeding range in South America. Swallow-tailed Kites occurring farther south in the Americas may remain resident or make shorter seasonal movements.

Before migration, something spectacular can happen.

Birds begin gathering into communal groups, sometimes forming enormous pre-migration roosts containing hundreds of individuals. American Bird Conservancy notes that these gatherings help birds build energy reserves before journeys that can reach thousands of miles.

For photographers and birders, these concentrations can produce unforgettable scenes as dozens or even hundreds of fork-tailed silhouettes circle through the sky.

A Bird That Nearly Disappeared From Much of America

The Swallow-tailed Kite once occupied a substantially larger portion of the United States.

Historically, the species occurred along the Mississippi River as far north as Minnesota. Its U.S. distribution later contracted dramatically.

Habitat alteration and historical persecution contributed to that decline.

There is encouraging news, however. Long-term monitoring cited by the Cornell Lab indicates that Swallow-tailed Kite populations increased substantially during the latter half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the species remains absent from much of its former U.S. range, and several states continue to consider it a species of conservation concern. Today, habitat loss remains an important threat.

Development, agriculture, logging, and other major landscape changes can eliminate the mature trees needed for nesting as well as the wetlands and open habitats where kites hunt.

Protecting large trees isn’t enough by itself. Swallow-tailed Kite conservation depends on maintaining interconnected landscapes containing nesting forest, wetlands, river corridors, and productive feeding habitat.

Swallow-tailed Kite vs. Mississippi Kite

Beginning birders occasionally confuse these two species because both are graceful, insect-eating raptors that occur in the southern United States.

In good views, however, they’re dramatically different.

The Swallow-tailed Kite is boldly black and white and possesses an enormous deeply forked tail. The Mississippi Kite is primarily gray, has a much shorter tail, and lacks the dramatic black-and-white pattern. Both species catch insects while flying, but the unmistakable forked tail of a Swallow-tailed Kite usually makes identification straightforward.

Interesting Swallow-tailed Kite Facts

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this bird is how thoroughly adapted it is to an aerial existence. Swallow-tailed Kites hunt in flight, capture prey without landing, eat while airborne, and spend much of the daylight hours soaring.

They are also unusually social compared with many raptors. Birds may nest near other pairs, forage together, gather at communal roosts, and form large concentrations before migration. And despite their impressive size in the air, they’re remarkably lightweight. A bird with a roughly four-foot wingspan may weigh only around a pound. That combination of low body weight, narrow wings, and an extraordinary tail produces one of the most maneuverable silhouettes in the North American sky.

Watching one isn’t really like watching a hawk. The bird seems to move through the air with almost no effort, continuously reshaping its tail while the wings remain nearly motionless. One moment it is soaring high overhead; seconds later it may be skimming a treetop and grabbing prey without ever touching a branch.

The Swallow-tailed Kite is also a reminder of how connected the Americas are. A bird soaring over a Florida swamp in spring may eventually leave the United States entirely and spend the nonbreeding season thousands of miles away in South America.

Protecting the species therefore means protecting more than an individual nesting tree or wetland. It means maintaining the enormous network of forests, rivers, wetlands, migration corridors, and wintering habitat that makes its annual journey possible.

For anyone lucky enough to encounter one, there’s usually no complicated identification process required. Just look for the black-and-white raptor with the impossibly long forked tail carving effortless turns through the summer sky.