I was going to title this post “You never know,” meaning you never know when or where you are going to find something interesting happening in the biological part of the natural world. I saw something unusual happening with Mississippi Kites over the course of a couple of days last weekend. It began on Saturday morning, as I was walking to our local Sam’s Club. There were several Mississippi Kites flying and soaring over the parking lot of Lowe’s. This is unusual because you normally don’t see more than three at a time. There must have been at least half a dozen, but they are hard to count because they are in motion, and they go behind trees and buildings, so they are not always visible. At the time, I thought “zugunruhe,” which refers to the phenomenon known in English as “migratory restlessness.”
Some personal and scientific background on Mississippi Kites: When I first started learning, from a scientific point of view, about things like endangered species, the environmental effects of human activities, etc., it was obvious that the use of DDT as an insecticide had had devastating effects on the population sizes of many bird species, particularly birds of prey, because many of them fed on insects, or on smaller birds that were insectivores, so bioaccumulation led to a build-up of toxins, eggshell thinning, reduced reproductive output, and population crashes. The Bald Eagle was probably the best known example of this.
For me the Mississippi Kite was the “poster child” of this phenomenon. I can remember the first time I saw a Mississippi Kite – I don’t remember the exact date or time, but it was in 1978 or 1979, in the Texas Panhandle. I remember this because my master’s thesis advisor, Charles Carpenter, got very excited, and actually stopped the car, so we could get out and see the Mississippi Kite. He had not seen one in several years.
Over the past several years, we have been seeing them flying over the campus at Austin College, and they have ben nesting in my neighborhood! We see a pair in the spring, and by the end of the summer, there are three – the parents and one offspring.
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