Conservation Takes Flight in Winyah Bay River Basin: 

SC TNC and the Waccamaw Refuge work with National Partners to Establish a Population Estimate for Swallow-tailed Kites

Swallow-tailed Kites © The Center for Birds of Prey

 Deep in the black-water swamps of South Carolina, we watched through binoculars a mossy heap perfectly nestled in the top branches of a Bald Cypress tree. The nest, nothing more that a precarious pile of twigs woven together with Spanish moss, belongs to a Swallow-tailed Kite.  We’ve come to the nest, ropes in tow, to bring the month-old nestlings closer to the ground than they may ever find themselves again in their adult life.

 Arguably, the most striking bird in Southeastern United States, the kite is a species of conservation concern and one of the rarest land birds without federal protection. This year, The Nature Conservancy and the Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge are part of an ambitious collaborative effort to establish a long-awaited population estimate for the North American subspecies.  

 A group of researchers, scientists, land managers, and conservationists, with a unifying passion for the bird have banded together as the Swallow-tailed Kite Conservation Alliance. Working under a mutual set of research, outreach, and monitoring priorities, the Alliance placed at the top of its list establishing a population estimate through synchronized roost surveys.

 The Nature Conservancy’s Winyah Bay and Pee Dee River Basin Project Area harbors some of the best Swallow-tailed Kite habitat in the State. The Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge was established at least in part to protect sensitive Swallow-tailed Kite nesting habitat along the Pee Dee and Waccamaw River systems. Today, with The Nature Conservancy’s help the Refuge has protected 22,500 acres of bottomland hardwood forest and associated uplands, which will be managed as old-growth forest, ideal nesting habitat for kites. The Refuge and Sandy Island Preserve fit with other state and privately protected lands to form matrix of protection spanning five river systems and over 125,000 acres

 The Conservancy is also hard at work protecting another kite nesting area just west of the Refuge and within the larger matrix – The Black River and Mingo Creek Neighborhood. With little federal or state ownership along this river system, there are an impressive 8000 acres of privately protected lands in close proximity to TNC’s 1296-acre Black River Preserve. The Conservancy is actively pursuing funding to add approximately 450 acres to the Preserve. 

 This year, the Waccamaw Refuge partnered with TNC to write a Challenge Cost Share (CCS) grant that will allow South Carolina to participate in the first multi-state synchronized roost survey.  The research through the grant will also generate important information about Swallow-tailed Kite habitat within the Refuge and far outside of its boundaries – on migratory and wintering grounds in Central and South America.

 Through the CCS grant, researchers from the Avian Research and Conservation Institute (ARCI) were contracted to place radio transmitters on kite nestlings. In early June, I joined two ARCI researchers and trudged through the swamp toward a Swallow-tailed Kite nest with two young on the Conservancy’s Sandy Island Preserve.

 The process of placing transmitters on nestlings is tedious and each step is approached with a great deal of caution. We worked carefully and in quick succession to place the climbing rope, climb the 80-ft cypress, lower the nestlings down in a pillow-case sack, place transmitters and hoist the birds back into the nest. All of this was done knee-deep in the floodplain forest of the Pee Dee River.

Within a few weeks, the radio signal transmitted from the small back-pack will help lead us to the large pre-migratory roosts that kites form at the end of the breeding season. On three days in July 2009, a handful of researchers in SC, GA, FL, LA, and MS will take flight simultaneously to count the roosts from fixed-wing aircraft with hopes of generating the most accurate population estimate for the species to date. 

While we worked to place the back-packs, Ken Meyer, Director of ARCI, admired how healthy the nestlings were. We both marveled at the fact that they weighed the same down to the last ounce – so uncommon for raptors.  No runts on this Preserve! My hope is that this indicator of good health means we might locate these birds again and again - in a few weeks in a pre-migratory roost, in a few months on cattle ranches in Brazil, and then back in the Winyah Bay area of South Carolina the following spring to assist their parents with another successful nesting effort.

Maria Whitehead
Project Director, Winyah Bay and Pee Dee River BasinThe Nature Conservancy

Maria is part of the Land Protection staff and is located in the Charleston satellite office of SC TNC. She obtained a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from Clemson University in 2003, Masters of Science in Wildlife Ecology and Management from the University of Georgia in 1999, and a BS in Biology from Davidson College in 1995. During her graduate and professional career, Maria has studied avian community ecology – including brood parasite-host dynamics, fluctuation in resource availability and songbird communities, and Swallow-tailed Kite breeding ecology. She has taught courses in Biology, Conservation, and Ornithology at Furman, The Citadel, and The College of Charleston. 

Maria is co-chair of the National Swallow-tailed Kite Conservation Alliance and research advisor to the Center for Birds of Prey. She continues to work with undergraduate and graduate students on avian research projects.

Maria is Project Director for The Nature Conservancy’s Winyah Bay and Pee Dee River Project Area. Maria joined the Conservancy in summer of 2007, and now works with private landowners, federal, state and local government agencies, as well as other conservation organizations on land protection, science and stewardship projects in the Winyah Bay and Pee Dee River Basin.