One of our favorite birding moments is seeing a Snail Kite in its slow, graceful glide — a flight so distinctive it’s become a symbol of Florida’s wetlands. Wings barely moving, drifting on the wind, the kite’s dark red eyes scour the surface of the water until, suddenly, it drops down to snag its next meal.
Over thousands of years, this elegant, compact raptor evolved alongside Florida’s unique watery landscape that stretches from the Everglades to around Orlando.
Everglade Kites live almost entirely on one wetlands species: round, freshwater Apple Snails about the size of a golf ball. Over time, the bird’s hooked beak has grown into the shape of a can-opener, perfectly adapted for extracting the snail from its shell.
Today, however, the future of this raptor — found nowhere else in the U.S. — depends on unraveling a mystery hidden in the state’s marshes: Why are the snails themselves disappearing?
Scientists say the puzzle has sent the kite on a “roller coaster ride,” its population swinging wildly between recovery and renewed collapse — and no one can say what comes next.
Threat of extinction — and an unexpected reprieve
The Snail Kite’s troubles began decades ago, as booming Florida altered the water flow across the Everglades, causing the bird’s population, then about 3,000 birds, to plummet. Already a federally listed Endangered Species, the kites gradually dropped to about 700. For a time, extinction seemed possible if not likely.
“There’s an 80 percent probability that in the next 30 years, snail kites will be extinct in the U.S.,” Wiley Kitchens, a University of Florida professor who has spent years studying the kite and its fragile food supply, warned at the time.
Then came an unexpected turn.
The kites found they could switch to an invasive species of apple snail that found its way from South America to wetlands across the state. Where these new snails were plentiful, kite numbers rebounded — and in some places exploded. State and federal wildlife managers began to think the crisis had passed.
The recovery lasted until now. A persistent drought that is straining Florida’s already stressed water network has undermined both native and invasive snails. In the past few years, the kite population dropped by roughly a third. Across the region, few of the kite chicks survived — especially in the Everglades, once the bird’s primary nesting stronghold.
“We have to figure out what’s wrong,” said Paul Gray, Audubon Florida’s science coordinator for the Everglades, who helped pull together the Snail Kite Coordinating Committee to search for answers. “The good news is you still got a couple of thousand birds left. But the bad news is the trend is not going right.”
Not hard to find — for now
Luck was with us when we went looking for Snail Kites a few weeks ago. As soon as we pulled off the road in a conservation area south of Orlando where we’d seen them before, an adult male kite flew up and perched 10 yards away, as if it had been expecting visitors.
He stood as still as a statue. His orange talons gripped the branch. His deep, dark brown plumage — almost black from a distance — set off those striking red eyes. In flight, a flash of white tail feathers blooms into a telltale stripe. The female and juvenile kites we would also see that day were mottled in lighter browns, but the adult male was unmistakable: a raptor both fierce and unusually serene.
A few minutes after his arrival, the kite lunged into the air and began circling low over the marsh.
This is one of the kite’s most appealing traits. Its flight is slow, steady, often close to the ground — easy to watch, right up until it drops into the wetland grasses to seize a snail.
“The kites are pretty glamorous birds,” Gray said. “They’re big and really easy to see when you get out on the water. It’s not like when you see a Peregrine Falcon — they’re gone in two minutes. The kites just hang out. They’re kind of nonchalant. So the charisma of a kite really helps. People can see them and they’re so cool looking with those beaks.”
Racing to solve the Snail Kite puzzle
Behind the scenes, the Snail Kite Coordinating Committee, the network of scientists, professors, Everglade researchers, government agencies and water and plant managers, is trying to figure out exactly what’s driving the new collapse of snails — and what can be done before the kite’s roller coaster drops even further.
Part of the project involves intense monitoring both the invasive and native snail populations since they’re keys to the kites’ survival. The invasive snails, believed to have spread from use in aquariums, do help provide food for kites, but they are also a destructive force, damaging everything from plant life to the smaller native snails.
“The invasives have such a negative impact on the ecosystem, that you don’t want to rely on them to save an endangered species,” Robert Fletcher, a University of Florida professor who’s part of the coordinating committee, explained on a university blog. “There’s a real conflict there.”
Another part of the research is tracking the kites themselves, their nesting and how many fledglings survive. The latest news on this is worrisome: this past breeding season, researchers found only about 30 nests across the entire state — and none in the Everglades, a trend that isn’t nearly enough to help rebuild the population and sustain the kites in Florida.
“It’s supposed to be a symbol of the Everglades, but the kites just haven’t recovered there,” said Gray, who’s spent his career devoted to the legendary ecosystem. “We just don’t know why and that’s the problem.”
Why we need the Snail Kite
Regardless of how people feel about birds, or in this case one of Florida’s signature endangered species, there are strong arguments for protecting them.
J. Scott Angle, a University of Florida vice president whose school is part of the kite rescue mission, put it this way: “Even if you don’t care about birds, this work might protect something you do care about — bass, if you’re a fisher; ducks, if you’re a hunter; airboat tours, if you’re a visitor, business owner or employee; and tax dollars if you’re a Floridian who benefits from the economic activity a healthy home for the snail kite generates.”
And the kite’s troubles don’t stop at the bird’s population numbers, or the decline of the snails. At its root, it’s about the long-running struggle in Florida to manage and divvy up its fresh water that sits on top of the sandy soil and marshes or in aquifers just below the porous surface.
A long list of players compete for that water, including farmers, developers, city water supplies and flood control agencies. All of those tend to have stronger voices, lobbyists and more powerful supporters than the birds.
But if the Snail Kite is taken seriously as an indicator species that reflects the state of the environment, Florida cannot let the current trends continue. The story of the Snail Kite isn’t just about a sleek and stately bird. It’s a message about how to care for this watery environment, including the lowly snail the kites that depend on them.
“The Florida apple snail really is the Goldilocks species,” said Paul Gray. “If you keep a wetland flooded all the time, it’ll turn into a kind of plant community that the snails really don’t do well in. When you dry out a wetland that the snails are in, they can last for about 3 months. If it’s longer than that, then they die.
“But if we can stay in that Goldilocks range for the snail, that’s pretty much what the kites and Florida wetlands need. That’s a good pattern for people too, because we fill up our wetlands every year and then we let them draw down and we fill them back up and we let them draw down. And that’s how you need to manage water in Florida.”
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