Getting to know the blackshouldered kite
I HAVE mentioned climate change as an important factor in changes in distribution of many species.
It may well be a factor in the case of the black-shouldered kite (known in Spanish, rather oddly as Elanio azul – no way can they be described as blue).
They are birds with a very patchy distribution in the Mediterranean Basin, a 1999 field guide describes the species as ‘very rare’ – which now seems a touch exaggerated. Since I saw my first pair of black-shouldered kites (and they were then known as black-winged) in Tunisia in the seventies.
Later I saw several in Gambia – they are well-distributed south of the Sahara, and are plentiful in the Indian subcontinent, as well as in other parts of southeast Asia.
But I encountered none in Spain until the late 1980s, when I saw a couple near the Coto Doñana (Andalucía).
As recently as the nineties, the tag ‘very rare’ was certainly justified, and I took parties to see – from afar – a pair of the birds which were almost always to be viewed (they were clearly nesting) during several years, not far from Cáceres.
They were largely absent from the rest of Spain.
But then, perhaps from the turn of the century, they began to appear in other areas. I saw one in Albacete, and twice we had a bird around El Hondo.
Suddenly black-shouldered kites weren’t rare at all – with a penchant for perching on cables or pylons, they are often pretty easy to see, and their hunting method, of slowly quartering the area, on harrier-like, lofted wings, seeking their prey of small mammals, birds and large insects, makes them easy to spot.
Grassy plains or cereal fields are often to their liking, and they have moved eastwards up the Guadalquivir valley, so that now a few pairs are to be found in most provinces, and a winter roost of at
least seven birds was recently found in Granada province
Closer to hand, odd birds have wintered around the Vega Baja, close to El Hondo during several winters, and pairs have actually nested – once in Murcia province, not too far from the new Murcia airport, and another in Alicante, on the plains of Villena.
It is to be hoped that the trend continues.