Mississippi Kite

If you look at the range map for Mississippi Kite in almost any field guide, you’ll immediately wonder why this southern species has a place in a compendium of the regularly occurring birds of New Hampshire. The story begins in 2008, when a pair of kites was discovered nesting in a roadside tree in Newmarket. This first attempt was thought to be something of a fluke, but biologists familiar with the species wondered if something momentous was going on near the shores of Great Bay. This is because the Mississippi Kite has a penchant for making unexpected “leaps” in its breeding range to colonize areas far from the core, as has happened in Arizona, Colorado, and Virginia. Were kites now doing this in New Hampshire? It turns out they were, and every year since there have been 1-4 nests in the towns around Great Bay. Breeding success has often been low, possibly because the shorter nesting season this far north makes finding food for chicks – they eat a lot of dragonflies – challenging in late summer, but the birds persist and it would seem that this southern species will remain an enigmatic member of the Granite State’s breeding avifauna.