Swallow-Tailed Kites in the Everglades

I have wanted to visit the Florida Everglades since I was in third grade. I don’t know what it was about the river of grass that first fascinated me. It was almost certainly not Marjorie Stoneman Douglas’s book. I also don’t think it was the idea of racing around in airboats with a cooler full of root beer.

I think it might have been that I had to a research project on an animal, and I chose the American Crocodile, a creature that can only be found in Florida. 

Decades later (god I feel old) it was not crocodiles that brought me back to the Everglades the work of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, well, and birds of course. We were going to the Miami Fort Lauderdale metroplex sprawl of traffic and urban hell to visit friends, and I was looking at birds to scope out. I was instantly confronted with the wall of green that runs along the western edge of the endless wasteland of suburbia. Like a shield of wilderness against the unchecked growth of the city. Like the natural world’s wall of life against the endless industrial churn of the city of Miami.

Except not quite.

The Everglades are a natural place. They really are a river of grass, just like Marjorie Stoneman Douglass said. But they are what they are because of her. I’m not going to get into the history of the people that lived in the Everglades before her, but in Miss Douglass’s Day (late 1800’s), the Everglades were in trouble. They were dammed, drained diked and developed to grow sugar. It was her book, ‘River of Grass’ that turned them into the largest ecological restoration project in the world!

Which means that the Everglades are not exactly natural. They’ve been used by the Calusa and the Tequesta for thousands of years, and by Americans for centuries. They currently provide all of the drinking water to the people of Miami. They also help prevent flooding and prevent drought. They are an example of ecological engineering, an area of science and conservation that I find fascinating.

It was all this that made the older me hold onto the dream of my younger self to visit the Everglades in person. I knew I was unlikely to see the prosaic crocodile from my young imagination—the Everglades are fresh water, after all, and the most important defining trait of these two species is that crocodiles prefer brackish water and not fresh—but as a birder I was hoping to see something far more spectacular.

A swallow-tailed kite.

Kites are graceful raptors of the sky that dive and swoop in flight, often catching bugs in flight. They are more graceful than hawks, more elegant than eagles. The swallow-tailed kite is the most graceful of all kites. Unlike the Mississippi kite or the white-tailed kite, the swallow-tailed kite has a deeply forked tail, like a swallow. Painted in black and white, this bird often shows up on the Texas coast during migration, but I’ve never seen one. This was the bird for me to see in the Everglades. This was the bird for me to see in Florida. Not only are they beautiful but it would be a lifer! And an iconic species in an iconic spot. Triple win!

So our first day in Ft. Lauderdale, I dragged my family out of bed, threw them in our car, sat through more absolutely horrid traffic, and escaped out to the Everglades. I had pinpointed the most naturalistic sounding airboat tour. Many of them were selling themselves as rollercoasters on the sea of grass which is not what I was after. Truly I wanted to kayak the Everglades in silence, but I was unable to find anything close enough with the ever-present traffic limiting travel time.

We arrived and I mistakenly told the attendant selling us tickets that we would ride on the group boat instead of the private tour. So instead of an airboat for six, I ended up on an airboat for 30. The fan was so loud, it must have scared every animal within a mile long before we got close. I don’t know if a smaller airboat would have made the extra one hundred and fifty dollar difference, but if you’re after birds, I think you should spring for the private tour. 

We set out with a bunch of seemingly disgruntled European tourists.

We saw… next to nothing. Some alligators, but I’ve had better looks from boardwalks. Some egrets, but I’ve had better experiences with them on my neighborhood walks if I wake up early enough.

I asked the guide if he ever saw swallow-tail kites and he told me not anymore, not since they started pumping water into this part of the Everglades. I stifled a laugh. Pumping water into the glades? How times have changed. I wasn’t able to ask why—what with the noise of boat—but I find it likely they would do this to help with water quality. Plants clean water after all, and there were quite a lot of them.

We drove (sat in traffic) back to our friends, and began the rest of our trip.

I did finally see a swallow-tailed kite. The next morning, a pair of these beautifully graceful birds dove and twirled high above the red light at the intersection where I was stuck, sitting in traffic.