Birdwatching - 2009 🐦

🦉 The black kite (Milvus migrans)

• Milvus (lat) - kite
• migrans (lat.) - migrating

Looking at this stern bird, you might think that it is some kind of serious predator. By the way, I thought the same thing when I moved from another city and first saw these birds in the yard.
But in fact, it is not a very good predator, and the kite prefers to be a scavenger. That's why there are a lot of them in landfills.

They arrive early, in the first wave, around the beginning of April.
As I said, these birds are mostly scavengers. They feed on leftover food from trash cans. dead animals (they especially love pigeons crushed by cars). It is very difficult to catch rodents. I once saw a kite catch a squirrel, but it managed to escape and it fell from a great height and ran away. They catch fish on the river, but it’s hard for them. In villages they steal small chickens and ducklings.