This is bird note.

Some birds are wonderfully graceful in flight.

Swallows spring to mind with their deft swoops and glides,

but there's a bird of prey in the American Southeast that takes

grace to an utterly new level.

The Swallow Tailed Kite. A Swallow Tailed kite, even perched, is a lovely bird. It's a slim, sleek raptor with a pure white head and underside,

offset by exceptionally long slender black wings. True to its name,

it sports a long, deeply forked black tail. A swallow-tailed kite in flight almost never flaps its wings. Instead, the

kite uses its tail to pivot and twist to guide its movements. The bird can

make sudden tight turns, upside-down moves, and quick backward dives.

Its aerial maneuvers hardly seem like flight at all, more like slipping and sliding across

the air.

Kites catch all their prey on the wing,

snatching large flying insects out of the air

and taking lizards and snakes

off leaves in the trees with their talons.

Then, in a magician quick motion, the kite transfers its prey from its talons to its hooked beak.

Spring or summer is the time to see swallow-tailed kites in the

southeast. Then they're off to South America covering hundreds or thousands of miles

all with hardly a flap of the wing.

For Bird Note, I'm Mary McCann. Oh,