Mississippi Kite

About the Mississippi Kite

A sleek, buoyant raptor of summer skies, the Mississippi Kite is a small, elegant bird of prey - pale gray overall with a whitish head, darker wings, and a black tail, graceful and falcon-like as it wheels and glides overhead. Few raptors are as effortless in the air.

Mississippi Kites are aerial insect hunters, catching dragonflies, cicadas, grasshoppers, and beetles on the wing and often eating them in flight. Sociable birds, they gather in loose groups to hunt over fields and towns and even nest colonially in shade trees.

In Texas they are warm-season breeders across much of the state, arriving in spring to towns, river woods, and the plains - a familiar sight over neighborhoods and golf courses - before gathering into flocks and streaming south in late summer.

A note from behind the lens: their habit of hunting insects over open ground gives great flight opportunities. Track a bird as it wheels overhead, use a fast shutter to freeze the moment it reaches down to a talon-full of dragonfly, and expose for that pale gray against the sky.