Driving out of my island retreat in late February I saw my first swallow-tailed kite of the season, pretty much right on schedule. They may have been around, but I hadn't been out where I could see them. It made my heart glad. I will never tire of these elegant aerialists. They don't use just their tail-feathers and wings to navigate, but also can turn their tail itself nearly 90 degrees, using it as a rudder, as they execute complicated maneuvers, rolls, and even backward dives. And they make it look effortless. Once aloft, they tend to ride the thermals all day, returning to the trees only at night, to roost.
Ornithologist/artist David Allen Sibley describes them as, "Unmistakable; incredibly graceful, [with a ] flowing flight."(The Sibley Guide to Birds. Knopf. 4th printing Jan. 2001, p.111).
When mature, these raptors have white bodies with long, slender wings trimmed in black, and a long, forked black tail. They measure about 2 feet from bill to tail tip, and have a wingspan of a good 4 feet or more. They are fairly gregarious, and nest close together.
There are 2 subspecies of Elanoides forficatus - one in the U.S., and one in Central and South America. The population in the States breeds in Florida, coastal Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina and parts of Texas. Their range in the U.S. used to extend up the Mississippi river all the way to Minnesota, but hunting and habitat loss have shrunk it drastically. They breed here in late winter and then in July gather in large flocks for the return to South America. The Central and South America population stays put.
They pluck their prey - mainly insects, reptiles and sometimes baby birds, from the treetops, and since the mangroves don't grow exceptionally tall here, it often is possible to get a good look at them as they hunt. They can eat, and even drink, on the wing. Unlike other raptors, they also will eat fruit. They are pretty adaptable - I used to see them in heavily-populated suburban Miami, and I see them over populated areas in Naples as well.
Apart from my own observations, I found information on these birds on the following websites:
American Bird Conservancy - abc.org
Cornell Lab - allaboutbirds.org
Florida Fish and Wildlife conservation Commission - myfwc.com."swallow-tailedkite"
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A few weeks after the filthy storm surge brought by Hurricane Ian in September of 2022, rendered all ground-hugging vegetation brown and dead, a few brave individual plants of blue-eyed grass, Sisyrinchium angustifolium, not only appeared, but actually bloomed. It was a little out of season for blooming, and I suspect it was triggered by the sudden kill-off - a desperate attempt to ensure that there would be a new generation.
The swale, where these diminutive iris thrive in my yard then became the staging ground for all the wallboard, furniture, appliances and personal belongings destroyed by the flood. That debris included sodden carpet, cans of chemicals, solvents, portable gas tanks,and other unimaginable, including half a pizza, that washed in from elsewhere. The FEMA claw trucks made regular runs, picking up this detritus with remarkable dexterity. As cleanup and demo continued, these piles of battered remnants of past lives regenerated with remarkable speed. The skill of the crane operators in maneuvering such colossal crude claws was impressive, as they managed to scrape up virtually every last piece of broken glass or plaster. Still it was in no way a delicate operation - it was digging and scraping and leveling on a brutal scale.
Instead of creating a desert, though, this enormous soil disturbance brought thousands of seeds to the surface. Some of these "weeds" were actually desirable plants, just not here, and certainly not welcome in the wild abandon with which they grew. The blue-eyed grass seemed overwhelmed.
The massive pollution spread by the flood paradoxically seems to have had a fertilizing effect in my yard. To be sure, fertilizer itself can be a pollutant, but the wasteland I expected after the flood didn't materialize. I had to pull out massive clumps of dune sunflower, Helianthus debilis, one of my favorite natives, which rendered the rest of the yard impassible, repeatedly.
I had to have the swale mowed - no way was I going to be able to hand-weed that mess. Mowing the swale made it look presentable - but it made the weeds bushier and denser. One of the plants taking over was a lovely little native legume called Pencil-flower, Stylosanthes sp. It grows wider than tall, and tends to be rather open when left alone, but it loved the mowing, getting much tighter and blooming like crazy.
I still had to do something about noxious exotics vying for control, so hand-weeding had to accompany shearing after all, Even with gloves I get scratched up by the woody twigs of the pencil-flower.
I wasn't even looking for it when I uprooted a clump of blue-eyed grass in one of my weeding sessions. Then I saw more...and more...and still more. All thriving and blooming like crazy. It was as though the plants, especially the pencil-flower, that I assumed had choked it out, had, instead, acted as a shelter from hot sun and clipper blades. The blue-eyed grass hadn't disappeared at all. It had been there all the time.
If I lived on Fort Myers Beach or Sanibel Island, which experienced catastrophic destruction, my story wouldn't necessarily have such a rosy ending. The Ding Darling Reserve on Sanibel opened only partly in February, 2024, then more fully in April of 2024. It was devastated by the wind and waves.
Maybe the natural landscape is recovering. I hope so. Given a little space and time, it seems that what we like to call the natural order will try to reassert itself, cling to its rhythms, even heal itself. But that is the big picture. In past decades and centuries one destroyed area wasn't so critical, because there were still hundreds, even thousands of unaffected acres, But now we've built out onto every available inch, and then some, especially along the coast, and we haven't left Mother Nature much recovery room. In fact, we build back stronger, deeper, higher. I am one of the guilty parties, living on what once was a barrier island, where I have no business being there at all. Yet I don't want to leave, and plenty more still want to move here.
(I'm having computer problems, so can't include photos or sketches. I hope to solve this issue soon).