Kite - a bird is quite large and predatory. She lives mainly in the Old World. A weak and hook-shaped beak is the main difference between these birds from other birds of prey. In addition, they have very short legs, but rather large and very long wings.
From the life of kites
Kite bird (photo No. 1) - this is not a golden eagle for you! He is not so magnificent! Kites are clumsy, lazy, and also not quite brave birds. Their flight is rather slow, but tireless! They are gaining tremendous height, even the most keen eye does not see them! At the same time, the kite is a smart enough bird! It is not the slightest difficulty for them to distinguish an ordinary person from a game hunter. In addition, kites avoid those places where they scared them.
Their daily diet is small mammals, snakes and lizards, frogs and insects. Very rarely, they are forced to hunt their own birds. Their nesting place is on the tops of trees. Kites are lined with dirty rags, paper scraps and other garbage. Clutch consists of 3-4 eggs. Female hatching them. Brown eggs with a white pattern. Hatching lasts about five and a half weeks. As a rule, one or a pair of chicks fly out of the nest. Kite - the bird is mainly migratory, but sedentary populations are also sometimes found.
"Orderlies" fishing
Kites - a kind of orderlies in fishing and hunting. It has already been proven that the benefits that these birds bring significantly exceed the harm that they can do by eating small birds and chicks from a brood of field and meadow game.
These predators are not very numerous in terms of species diversity. Zoologists count only 8 species of these birds. Perhaps the most famous is the red kite, living in the territory from the Far East to Spain! We’ll talk about him.
Red kite
This species of feathered predator can be easily distinguished from all others by its highly bifurcated tail. Outwardly, it (the tail) resembles a double-toothed fork, so some zoologists call it forked. Red kite - the bird is very bright! His head and throat are painted snow-white with stripes of black-brown color, his chest is red (“rusty”), the abdomen is the same. The shoulders and back are brown-black, and the wings are black. Red predators feed on carrion, black-backed fish, frogs, reptiles, small mammals and invertebrates.
This type of kite is fairly easy to tame. Interestingly, the caught red dodger first pretended to be dead. So he lies until he realizes that all his attempts to fool the hunters are futile!
Quite often, the red kite is confused with its fellow - black. But they are noticeably different in size! The black kite is much smaller than red. Its plumage is darker. Distributed this species is much wider than the first. It is the black predator that lives throughout Russia. In addition, the so-called kite-parasite that lives in Africa is very similar to red kites. Many zoologists are categorically against isolating the parasite kite into a separate species.