Snail Kite

About the Snail Kite

The Snail Kite is one of the most specialized raptors on Earth - a marsh hawk whose deeply hooked, slender bill exists for exactly one task: extracting apple snails from their shells. Males are slate gray with red eyes and legs; females and young birds are brown and heavily streaked. Both show a bold white tail base that flashes in their slow, floppy hunting flight.

It hunts by coursing low over marsh vegetation or still water, snatching snails from at or just below the surface with its feet, then carrying them to a favorite perch where the bill's wire-thin hook slips the snail free without breaking the shell. Piles of empty shells accumulate under these perches like kitchen middens.

The species' fortunes rise and fall with water. In the United States it breeds only in Florida, where the Everglades population was listed as endangered in 1967 and has fluctuated with droughts and water management ever since - though the arrival of a larger exotic apple snail has recently boosted numbers. Across the American tropics, from Mexico to Argentina, it remains widespread and common in wetlands.

In Texas the Snail Kite is an extreme rarity - the state has only a small handful of accepted records of wandering birds, which is precisely what makes finding and photographing one here so memorable.