Rare bird flies high over Lakewood Ranch area

River Club resident loves swallowtail kites, no strings attached.

By Pam Eubanks
| 8:40 a.m. April 4, 2018

East County
Neighbors

Margi Haas traded her fast-paced Manhattan lifestyle three years ago for the suburbs at River Club.

In Manhattan, she would see woodpeckers, cardinals and other small birds in her small backyard. Here in East County, there was so much more variety.

“I’m running around, looking at birds here,” said Haas, a business consultant who has become an avid bird watcher. “I’ve been to places most people don’t go, like Duette Preserve. I love being outside.”

Tending to plants on her lanai one summer morning in 2016, Haas saw a black-and-white bird fly overhead.

It had long, pointed wings and a deeply forked tale.

“I’d seen them over River Club Golf Course, so I knew what they were,” Haas said. “I thought, ‘These birds live on the wing.’

Fun facts

- Kites come to the southeastern United States for spring and summer breeding and then migrate to the Yucatan, the Pantanal in Brazil or other areas of South America.

- Most kites congregate in one area in Lake Okeechobee in Glade County. Roosts like the one Margi Haas sees in River Club are relatively few in number.

- Kites usually only produce one young per year.

- The birds are recognizable during flight with long, pointed wings and a deeply forked tale. They rarely flap their wings while flying, instead almost continuously moving their tails.

- They mainly eat flying insects such as dragonflies and cicadas. They also eat snakes, lizards, and even nestlings and eggs as they skim across the treetops. Unusual for a raptor, the birds eat fruit, especially on their wintering grounds.

They flew in front of the house to a tree across the street behind the neighbor’s house. I had never seen this bird perched.”

And so her obsession with swallow-tailed kites began.

Since that first 2016 encounter, Haas has kept an eye to the sky, looking for the “beautiful hawk” that comes to the area in early spring for nesting season and leaves in summer after preparing for its 5,000-mile migration to South America.

The birds returned to River Club in early March.

“I was really excited because they are fun to watch,” Haas said. “You never know because of their dangerous migration whether they’ll return here.

“They’re the kind of bird (that) men get poetic about,” she said. “I call them beautiful hawks.”

Haas particularly watches the kites that gather at that solitary pine tree at her neighbor’s home before they head off to another location to roost for the night. They return briefly in the morning, before heading out on their daylong flying excursions.

Haas keeps statistics on what she sees — how many kites, what time of day and whether it’s raining, for example — all in an effort to learn more about the creature that inspires her.

She is a both a researcher and teacher by nature, so she likes discovering more about their habits, and has since started speaking to various Audubon groups about the bird variety. She has two talks lined up in May, for the Venice and Sarasota Audubon Societies.

She hopes she can lead bird-related talks, featuring kites, to local school children or others who want to learn more about the wildlife.