The Florida Snail Kite
Rostrhamus sociabilis plumbeus

To begin: what is a Bird?

A Bird is a warm blooded, bipedal (two legs)

vertebrate (has a backbone) with feathers,

bills and wings and most can fly.

It lays eggs to reproduce and many theories have

it classified as a direct descendant of Dinosaurs,

dating back to the Jurassic period.

The Endangered Snail Kite,

also known as the Everglades Kite, was

through the thoughtless drainage of their Habitats,

 reduced to the tragic numbers in the 1960's of 25.

Then with some help, they rebounded in the 1990's to 700.

Today their numbers are around 400 breeding pairs.

 The Ancestral home of the Snail Kite has been in

 the Everglades and that may have been his undoing.

The Everglades is an Ecosystem is serious trouble

and so are many of its inhabitants, including the

 first choice of food for the Snail Kite, the Apple Snail.

This Endangered Bird of Prey has a beak designed to do

just one thing perfectly, to get a snail out of its shell.

But the Ecosystem that these two have shared has

changed dramatically over the past decades and

the Snail population is now in morbid decline.

Evolution has played a rather nasty trick on this bird,

because its very special beak is why it is now having

such a difficult time learning to adapt to other food.

Places to learn more:

Audubon

Snail Kite

Snail Kite - Conservation

Snail Kite - Natural History

Cornell

Snail Kites

Environment News Service

South Florida Water Management helping Kites

Florida DEP

Florida Conserves Land for Birds

FFWCC

Snail Kite

NWF

Endangered Species - Snail Kite

USFWS

Snail Kite

SOFIA USGS

Project 2003

Snail Kite

Walking with the Alligators

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