The Florida flurry subdues. One kite tarries in the Magnolia State.

Bluff, Gulf Hammock and Pace depart the U.S. PearlMS the last tagged bird to remain. 

Bluff and Gulf Hammock left their pre-migration areas on the same day, 12 August. Bluff had been cruising the Savannah River floodplain forest and adjacent farm fields for weeks, but recently hopped down to the Altamaha River near Jessup, Georgia, and headed to Florida two days later.  Moving quickly, he spent one night on the St. Marys River (the Florida/Georgia border), one night south of Gainesville, Florida, crossed southeast to Lower Wekiva River Preserve State Park, then made great time on 17 August flying all the way to Okaloacoochee Slough State Forest west of Lehigh Acres, Florida.  The next day, he was south of the Florida Keys by 1:00 pm on his way to western Cuba.  Flying through the night just off the northwestern shore, Bluff continued another 130 miles across the Yucatan Channel, reaching the shore of Cancun, Mexico, at 11 pm the night of 20 August.  We’ll see if he will linger on the Yucatan before continuing south, as most of the tracked kites have done.

Gulf Hammock has been right on Bluff’s tail.  On 12 August, she began edging southward along the Oconee River, Georgia, after her six-week stay in the region.  She spent one more night in Georgia, in the Okeefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, before passing just east of Gainseville, Florida as she picked up speed.  Gulf Hammock roosted north of Leesburg, Florida, on 15 August, in the Lake Wales Ridge State Forest of central Florida the next night, then spent her last night in Florida on the coastal fringe of Everglades National Park before flying out to sea by 10:00 am on 18 August.  Gulf Hammock passed 15 miles west of Key West, Florida, before coming ashore near Santa Lucia, western Cuba, in the early dark hours of 19 August.

Pace also began his migration last week.  After a 12-day pre-migration visit to Sumter County, Florida, where he feasted on flying insects over pastures and melon fields with many other Swallow-tailed Kites, he flew 145 miles south on 18 August to arrive near the Caloosahatchee River just east of LaBelle, Florida, for the night.  By the next night, Pace had reached the Florida Keys, where he roosted in Long Key State Park, putting himself in a prime position to cross the Straits of Florida the next day.

We are still watching PearlMS in Mississippi to track his southbound route to Central America, which most likely will be very different from the Florida and South Carolina birds.  In the last three years, PearlMS has circumnavigated the Gulf, remaining over land for his entire trip through Mexico.

Swallow-tailed Kite migration update on all birds

13 August 2014 update of seven satellite-tracked Swallow-tailed Kites.

Pace continues to stage in Sumter County, Florida (west-central peninsula), where he has been since 6 August. He makes foraging trips 13 to 28 miles north and east from his roost site.

PearlMS seems to be exploring a little farther and wider from his nesting area. He’s got a favorite foraging field 8 miles southeast, and also is making forays north on the Pearl River.

Bluff continues to use his roosting and foraging areas along the Savannah River between Sylvania, Georgia and Estill, South Carolina.

Gulf Hammock has been lingering along the Ocmulgee River south of Abbeville, Georgia for the last month, but her latest GPS location, on the night of 12 August, was 21 miles to the south. She could be our next Swallow-tailed Kite to leave the United States.

After arriving on to the Yucatan Peninsula 3 August, Palmetto exhibited true stopover behavior within Quintana Roo. She stayed in one area for seven days, no doubt resting and feeding after her 200 mile overwater flight from Florida via Cuba. On 11 August, Palmetto proceeded south, took a shortcut from Placencia, Belize, to Cuyamel, Honduras. She is now nearing the Nicaraguan border in the Reserva Biologica Tawahka, Honduras.

Day is moving along steadily in Central America. Once she made it to southern Nicaragua, she began hugging the Caribbean coastline, a good navigational aide and, with its coastal lowlands, probably a good source of food. Day is nearing Panama City, Panama.

MIA is 640 miles ahead of Day and recently crossed the Andes Mountains near Popayan, Colombia. He is almost to the State of Huila and moving steadily.

Pace: Not lost but found!

Pre-migration movements of Pace, a satellite-tagged Swallow-tailed Kite.  

Pace had been using a relatively small area around Doctors Lake in southern Jacksonville, Florida close to his nesting area. On 6 August, he made an abrupt move to northwest Sumter County, about 100 miles, where he spent the night. The next day, he set off to forage with 200 or so other kites over farm fields west of Oxford, in central Florida. This foraging aggregation has been giving birders and photographers a spectacular show for several weeks. 

One such photographer, Will Randall, captured an amazing photo of Pace amongst the hundreds of foraging kites. You can see the GPS satellite transmitter, which looks to be in excellent condition after over 2 years on the back of a Swallow-tailed Kite that has carried it on two round-trips to Brazil and while helping raise two broods of young in northern Florida. During this time, Pace has clocked over 25,000 miles! 

Pace photographed by Will Randall on 
7 August 2014 Sumter County, Florida. 
A real needle in a haystack! 

Pace is one of three of our tagged kites that have been photographed in foraging aggregations, which aid swallow-tails in locating large groups of insects on which to feed. You may recall that Palmetto, from South Carolina, was spotted in 2013 north of the Altamaha River in Georgia. In addition, Bluff, Palmetto’s mate, recently was seen over a foraging field near Allendale, South Carolina. These communal feeding sites are vital to Swallow-tailed Kites as they put on fat for their long-distance migration. Some individuals will return to the same areas year after year and remain a month or more before migrating southward. 

These locations provide a great opportunity for bird enthusiasts – or those so encouraged by such a sight – to watch impressive numbers of Swallow-tailed Kites in beautiful aerial displays as they repeatedly snatch and swallow insects, often just above the ground.  The photographer of Pace's photo, Mr. Randall, a sailplane and regular airplane pilot most of his life, described it in his email to us:

"I always marvel at the way god created the swallow-tailed kite. The bird has a high aspect ratio wing, a small low drag head and beak, a nearly retractable landing gear, low drag body, and scissor tail. This is everything a high performance sailplane has today. The bird came several hundred thousand years before the sailplane!"

Some of these flocks will number in the hundreds, another striking example of how the Swallow-tailed Kite’s highly evolved social behaviors have helped this species persist.

You can be a guardian of Pace and the other six Swallow-tailed Kites by pledging to be a monthly sustainer in our Keep on Trackin' program. Your gift will keep their streams of information beaming to satellites, granting ARCI the precious opportunity to learn more about their lives in order to develop techniques to protect them in a world that threatens to change faster than they can adapt.

Learn more about your opportunity to "Keep on Trackin'": http://arcinst.org/keep-on-trackin
 

Day and Palmetto set forth

If you guessed that Day would be the next of our GPS satellite-tagged Swallow-tailed Kites to migrate, you would have been correct! However, Palmetto was not far behind.

Day and Palmetto set forth on their 2014 southbound migration. 

Day departed her communal roosting sight on 27 July after spending 20 nights there in preparation for migration. She roosted 18 miles east of Lake Kissimmee on the night of the 27th and traveling east of Lake Okeechobee the following day, she made good time southbound (most of our satellite-tracked kites, including Day, usually travel south along the western side of the lake), passing through sugar cane and other agricultural fields and over the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge just in time to sleep in southeastern Hendry County. From there, it was a non-stop flight to Cuba via the Everglades, Florida Bay, and the Florida Keys, arriving near the town of La Teja in the middle of the night of 30 July. Unlike the usual route through western Cuba to the Yucatan Peninsula, Day flew directly south at mid-island and embarked on an amazing 550-mile trans-Caribbean flight to the Honduran island of Roatan where she remained for the night. After a quick 35-mile flight the next day to the Honduran mainland, Day struck out over land and reached northern Nicaragua by 3 August.

Palmetto also has made the big move to Central America. She had been in her pre-migratory location along the Altamaha River on the coastal plain of Georgia for 19 days before starting south along the river on 29 July. After one more night on the Altamaha, she made a run for central Florida, flying 210 miles to spend the night in the northern Green Swamp in Sumter County. Her last night in Florida, 31 July, was in the Babcock Ranch Preserve in Charlotte County. Continuing her speedy way south, she left Cape Sable at the extreme southern tip of peninsular Florida around 6 pm and arrived on Cuba, 30 miles west of Havana, in the middle of the night. She took the predictable westerly route through Cuba the next day, and made her way across the Gulf of Mexico to arrive in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico, on 3 August before the sun rose. She is now in the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Preserve, which often serves as a stopover location for our southbound Swallow-tailed Kites. We’ll see how long she stays here.

Because of Day’s long over-water flight, she is now within 470 miles of MIA. He slowed a bit in Honduras and Nicaragua, hugging the Caribbean coast, and is now in eastern Panama.

Bluff continues to forage and roost along the Savannah River near Allendale, SC. (Local Swallow-tailed Kite enthusiasts, including the dedicated conservationists of the Lower Savannah River Alliance and their supporters, recently spotted a bird with a transmitter, most likely Bluff, within a flock of kites foraging on insects over a farm field), Gulf Hammock is on the Ocmulgee River in Georgia, her habitual pre-migration conditioning site many miles north of her Florida nesting territory. Pace is still along Doctor’s Lake in southern Jacksonville, and PearlMS remains near the Pearl River in Mississippi.

MIA on the fast track

Movements of MIA from 18 July 2014 to 29 July 2014

MIA has wasted no time on his southbound trek that began 18 July.

After a brief respite east of Havana, Cuba, following his midnight arrival, he left the shoreline of Guanahacabibes Peninsula on the evening of 20 July, coming ashore again in the middle of the night 14 miles south of Cancun, Mexico. When the sun rose, he continued south to the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, where many southbound Swallow-tailed Kites are known to stopover for a week or more after their arduous over-water flight (ARCI’s Gina Kent described this and other details of kite migration in her Masters research). MIA, on the other hand, spent less than 24 hrs here before continuing south. 

He left the Belize coast near Placencia on a short-cut across Guatemala’s Amatique Bay, then continued moving rapidly over the Caribbean coastal plain of Honduras and Nicaragua to his present location not far from the Costa Rican border. MIA has made impressive southbound progress every day since leaving Florida, stopping only at night to rest. 

Which Swallow-tailed Kite will be the next to leave Florida?