On the Wing: Black-shouldered Kite

An attractive raptor even while perched, the Black-shouldered Kite is hard to forget once spotted hovering

For a long time after I learned to identify this bird, also called the Black-winged Kite to differentiate it from the Australian  Black-shouldered Kite (Elanus axillaris), I did not witness its flight. During the winter dusk near my village in Rae Bareli, I always saw it hover over potential prey that it had spotted on the ground. All you needed was to scan the horizon and, eight times out of 10, you could spot this bird hovering. The kite hovers over open scrub or grassland patches with its wings held high up and with slow wingbeats, beginning quite high up and gently gliding lower before it starts hovering again. This, presumably, is a tactic to get closer to its prey and fix its location on the ground. Sometimes the bird shifts sideways while still hovering. The action is repeated 2-5 times after which the raptor either swoops down or flies off to locate another quarry - usually lizards and rodents.

Its flight is similar to its hover -- gentle wing-beats punctuated by long glides. On this occasion, I first saw it perch on a tree stump as the wind gently caressed its soft white down feathers. It fixed me with its sparkling red eyes and after a beat took off gently, skimmed the tops of the thorny acacias and flapped out of view.

This elegant raptor, with its diagnostic grayish-black shoulder patch and red, owl-like iris, is found throughout India except for the country's extremities.

Text and photos by Sahastrarashmi
Read all posts in our On the Wing series 

Raptor Friday - Black-Shouldered Kite

The Black-winged Kite alias the Black-shouldered Kite (Elanus caeruleus) is easily the most handsome and the most distinguishable of kites. The first time I saw this bird was in a photo, shot by my photography guru Prabakar Venkatraman, in which this bird was perched on a steel rod at the top of a building. I sat open-mouthed looking at the picture -- a white, grey and black bird with captivating cherry-red eyes -- and wondered when I would get a chance to see it. A year later I saw it perch, at what seemed to be a light year away, on a high-tension wire. Since then, I would run into this fairly common bird time and again.

The bird is charecterized by the round, kitish head with red eyes, white body, bright red eyes with black highlights, and black wings. It is regularly seen in open country, deserted scrublands and in open cultivation, perched on roadside electric or telephone cables, tree branches without a lot of leaves, and most often on high-tension electric lines.


In flight the bird is very elegant -- the long, black-tipped wings are held out with the primaries tapering to a pointed edge. The flight is relatively slow, and the bird hovers over open areas with their tail feathers fanned out, wings flapping, as it seeks out prey below.

Though sexes are alike, juvenile kites have orange eyes and white tips to the wing feathers. The Black-winged Kite feeds on insects, rodents, reptiles and, when opportunity permits, smaller birds.


Text and photos: Sandeep Somasekharan