Swallow-tailed kites’ air show draws birdwatchers, photographers to Allendale

ALLENDALE, S.C. -- Roy Wade isn’t sure how long swallow-tailed kites have been making summer pilgrimages to the farm fields of Allendale County, but he’s been making them since 1970.

Back then, he and his children were often the only spectators. A friendly local dentist told Wade how the striking black-and-white members of the hawk family -- dozens of them, graceful and lightning-fast -- appear each morning above the tree line near the intersection of Revoluntionary Trail and Barton Road. Then they swoop into the field, tallons extended, to grab june bugs that begin hovering above the grass just as the sun evaporates the dew.

“I could sit there with my children and watch them feed,” Wade said. “I was amazed.”

It’s been a long time since Wade had the field to himself, though.

Nearly every morning from July through mid-August, birdwatchers and nature photographers from around the Southeast park on the road shoulder to watch aerial displays that last a few hours. Indeed, Wade is at least in some small way responsible for the growing crowd. He moved to Columbia in 1988 and often accompanies fellow members of the Carolinas’ Nature Photographers Association and the Midlands Master Naturalist Association to the field.

One recent Sunday morning, a group of retired ladies from Columbia, a couple from Sun City Hilton Head, several members of Wade’s photography association and a birdwatcher from Charleston were among the dozen or so on-lookers. The day before, the crowd was easily twice as large, when the Lower Savannah River Alliance conservation group held its second-annual kite outing there.

People are drawn here for at least three reasons.

The first is the sheer number of swallow-tail kites. The species was once widespread in the southeast but disappeared from many areas in the early 20th century, according to the Audubon Society. The birds can still be spotted throughout the Lowcountry, but Wade thinks few spots remain where people can see dozens of birds engaging in the sort of feeding activity that is an everyday occurrence in Allendale.

Access is another reason Allendale is popular among birders. The property Wade has visited for more than four decades is privately owned, but birdwatchers and photographers have no trouble getting an up-close look from the shoulder of the public roadway.

“Photographers love it here because these birds will often fly as close as 50 feet,” said Don Wuori, a Carolinas’ Nature Photographers Association board member and semi-retired Columbia pediatrician. “This field is open to the road all along its length, and you have a wide, open field, with not much blocking your view.”

Nonetheless, with swallow-tailed kites, easy access doesn’t make for easy photography. Wuori recalls the frustration of his first attempt to capture them with his lens.

“They’re moving,” Wuori said. “They don’t slow down so you can take a picture.”

But that’s a third reason -- watching a swallow-tailed kite isn’t like watching a robin pluck nightcrawlers from your front lawn. Swallow-tails put on a genuine air show.

Swallow-taileds -- larger, less common and more graceful than Mississippi kites, which sometimes feed alongside their cousins in Allendale -- rarely flap their wings while flying. According to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website, they continuously rotate their long, scissor-like tails, often to nearly 90 degrees, to hold a heading, turn sharply or trace tight circles while drifting across the sky.

Sort of like a feathered, floating washing machine.

Strapped to a jet pack.

Swallow-tailed kites are known to pluck lizards from treetops, but their feeding activity along the ground provides the highlights in Allendale. Tallons extended, they grab unsuspecting june bugs, bring the prey to their mouths in mid-flight, extract the insects’ innards, then discard the exoskeleton.

A group of ladies along the field fence squeal in delight as they witness this behavior.

“It’s like he’s eating a crawfish!” one exclaims.

Wade has been trying to capture a sharp image of a kite as it first snares a june bug. Satisfied with a shot he has captured this morning -- perhaps the best he has ever captured -- he turns off his camera and watches the rest of the show.

“Other lands around here have changed,” Wade said, noting the conversion of some pasture land to managed pine forest. “This area here has stayed the same in its use by farmers. This is the way it was when I found it in 1970.”

Follow audience engagement editor Jeff Kidd at twitter.com/InsidePages.